Fr. Nicholas Sheehy: We Are Right To Believe in Life After Death

It is hard for us to believe truly that we are going to die. Perhaps, believing in the reality of our own death marks the passage to adulthood. “The difficulty to conceive of our own deaths is perhaps some kind of survival mechanism to prevent it from actually happening” (Samuel, 2019). If we can somehow convince ourselves that only other people die, it does not seem real to us and is somehow less threatening.

Many of us seem to have “a neurosis when it comes to death, with most of us displaying the classic signs of such a disorder (e.g., anxiety, depression, hypochondria) whenever we have to confront the subject in real life” (Samuel, 2019). Our minds are sick when faced with the reality of death. We try to avoid the topic by manifesting some other disorder, such as anxiety, depression, or hypochondria. Whether we are confronting the death of a loved one or coming to terms with our own mortality, death is a challenge. …

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