Many of the expressions used to signify the death and dying of human beings focus on the simple fact of the end of physical life:  X has expired; X is no more; X has passed away.

The expression X has fallen asleep is also commonly used, but the metaphor is not unambiguous. Sleep is not the end of life – one wakes up, after all. Some have therefore taken exception to the use of the metaphor.

 In death, one does not simply sleep. To die, to sleep, Hamlet soliloquised, dagger in hand, and then draws back from the implications. For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come…must give us pause.

Many of our expressions also express the impact of death on the community. X has left us; X has departed; X’s wife has lost her husband. Here again, language conveys the basic fact that ordinary interaction with the deceased is now ended, though it begs some questions.

Who is the X that has departed, if his corpse is still here? Where has X, sans corpse, gone to? These are, of course, some of the big issues one has to deal with in dealing with death, and we will return to them.

Other expressions deal with the relation between death and time. X has gone to his eternal home. This implies that in death, X has passed out of time for a destination not within time, which is not a sojourn but a home. Death is not an end, it seems, but a transition. Again, very big issues.

One cannot overlook some of the significant images employed in connection with death. Death is rest or peace; to die is to be harvested by the grim reaper, and so on.

The notions of rest and peace are a fundamental part of Christian understanding, though they are less passive than ordinarily thought. In pace/In peace was a standard inscription on Christian graves in earliest times, and it meant not in peace and quiet, but in the victory of Christ. The dominant word Jesus speaks out of the resurrection is peace, which is shorthand for I have overcome.

Outside of this context, rest or peace is practically vacuous. What it also conceals is that death is an enemy, as St Paul said, and that to die is to be invaded, or, as the image of the reaper implies, to be harvested. 

At the same time, death is something that occurs “naturally”. No harvesting seems required sometimes. People simply die. They live -- long lives sometimes -- and then they die.
Again, we know of instances where someone chooses to forego life, since life means being without or apart from a loved one. The two lives were so entwined for so long, that a separate life is unthinkable. The surviving partner chooses to die -- and does so.

Death in human experience and language is thus a series of paradoxes: it is both end and transition; terror and liberation; something violent and something maturing from within; something that happens to us, and something we ourselves do; something natural or occurring by nature, and something that runs counter to all natural volition.

Let me now return to the basic question I raised in part 1: what actually takes place when someone dies?  What do people ordinarily think happens? The standard answer to this question is that death involves a separation of the soul from the body.

The vital principle leaves the body, which up till then was animated by it. One may just as easily say that the body leaves the soul or withdraws from it. In either case, the fundamental fact is the fact of separation.

The separation of the soul from the body has also been the standard theological definition of death from earliest times. One must therefore regard it, says theologian Karl Rahner, as the classic definition – though Rahner goes on to say that the definition is a mere description. It fails to define the real nature of death, because the concept of separation remains obscure.

What does separation mean? The plain meaning of the word is the abolition of a connection. X and Y, for example, are linked together; the link is broken; X and Y are separate. Rahner could not mean that there’s some obscurity here. The meaning is as plain as day.

The real issue is the nature of the connection before separation. Two friends, for example, meet in downtown Port of Spain; they chat for a while, and then they separate. In wartime, refugees flee their own country and pour into another, and family members get separated.

 In a vehicular accident, an arm or a leg may be separated from the rest of the body. In all these instances the meaning of separation varies, according to differences in the different connections.

If body and soul are separated in death, the meaning of separation here too depends on how the two were connected before death.

An ancient tradition of reflection on the soul saw it as an entity that uses the body as an artist uses a tool or a musician an instrument. There has also been a tradition that saw the soul as imprisoned in the body. The implication of separation from this perspective is obvious. Soul and body are not separated because they were always divided.

In death, the soul lays aside its tool or its instrument, or is released from prison. Another conclusion is that since the soul is the real or substantive person, what is left behind is nothing more than inessential matter. A third, and perhaps most important conclusion is that in death, the real person, the “I”, remains fundamentally uninvolved. 

Experience has never bought into this, however. No one grieves over inessential matter. Here our instincts are right on target. Another definition of the soul, however, stemming from Aristotle and accepted by Catholic tradition, is that the soul is form of the body, the way a stamped symbol, for example, unites with liquefied silver to make a coin. 

If soul and body must be envisaged as essentially belonging together, certain conclusions follow. In death no zone of existence possibly remains unaffected. Death itself cannot be viewed as an amicable parting of the ways between two things that have always been unrelated.

What happens is neither neutral nor natural but catastrophic.