One thing is certain. When we talk, when we act, when we commit ourselves to any project – big or small – when we retire for the night or rise for the day: sooner or later our stories will come to an end.

That end-of-story windup might come suddenly and turn out a surprise, or be protracted and long expected, easy or pain-ridden, dreaded or welcomed. In any case, the kind of death we will have is not foreseeable. As to what follows or does not follow, that’s neither within our personal control nor in the hands of those whose pronouncements on that head have been most persuasively asserted.

And yet, for at least the past hundred years or more, the wise heads – who determine emotional style and the moral parameters – have shared the assumption that the life we’re living now will be the whole story. Long or short, lucky or unlucky, when the final curtain comes down, the play we’re in will be over. The background buzz has been of a jerky, syncopated, politely repressed nihilism.

These assumptions have provided the boundary conditions for modern life. Human life, moderns have assumed, is just for the living. The dead have no share in the challenges that now confront the living. And, although some achievements may be of a size to outlast those who did the actual work to produce them, sooner or later the entire human enterprise will likely be over. At the “it’s all over time,” there’ll be no intelligent survivors left to care about what someone in former times might have done. The people will have all died and the records will be all lost.

*. *. *

But suppose that’s wrong? Suppose we don’t actually go out the way a light bulb goes out when the switch has been flicked? Suppose, when we can’t stay in our bodies, for better or worse we still don’t get to take leave of ourselves! Suppose that in fact we’re all still alive, although no longer in these present time-and-space conditions in the way that we used to be.

In 2020, Christopher Kerr, M.D. Ph.D, and chief medical officer at Hospice Buffalo, published Death is But a Dream, a book about the research he’d conducted. His findings were recently publicized by reporter Caitlin Gibson in a June 19th article in The Washington Post, a highly regarded mainstream source.

So what’s the latest news, for us the living, about life’s end? The terminally ill – when interviewed by professionals trained to distinguish between hallucinations and reports that appear sane, clear and credible – report that patients have lively conversations with cherished friends long departed and visit places still held dear. They revisit scenes of combat and comrades killed who now stand ready at hand for reunions postponed a lifetime ago.

Sometimes, present experiences offer confirmation of past events previously unknown to surviving family. Or the confirmation can be of the moral kind. Experiences that were left jagged, broken off or misused, revisit the dying person – this time returning to be mended. For the patient who is not bluffing, but is in earnest about what needs to be faced, fixed or completed, the last days can provide a time for revisitings and repair. 

Assuming that Kerr’s research has been as methodical and scrupulous as such investigations can be, what do findings of this kind tell me? For most of my working life in philosophy, I’ve not been an atheist, a philosophical materialist, or a reductionist for whom our humanly-lived complexities were to be construed as “nothing but” perturbations in and among subatomic particles. So the Kerr findings upset no worldview that I happen to hold. But they would overturn cultural assumptions that have been in ascendency among its most educated members for the past hundred years or more.

So what would have to change, in our culture, if the story published in The Washington Post should get around, and be taken seriously?

What would have to give way would be the belief that, in the end, “it doesn’t count.” But what if “the end” isn’t the end? Then, what we do, what we think and say, really does count, in this world and any other. We’re visible, we’re palpable, we’re memorable, and all of it makes a difference. Human lives are not absurd. Each of us affects and influences each other and has a say in the whole course of things. From the grass underfoot to the councils of power in the world, the tiniest gesture might count as much as the largest. We need to honor the narrative we’re in and do our best to make sense of it. This because – 

it all counts.