Recently we were with my wife’s sister, Gina, when she took her last breath. She was surrounded by family and went painlessly.

            We immediately missed her smiles, her laughter, her stories of a convoluted life, from China to Malaysia and then America. She weathered two husbands and had an adoring family.

            Where did she go?

            I’ve been with four creatures at the moment of their deaths. Well, two were our dogs. But besides them, one was my wife’s mother, and then there was Gina.

            The mystery of death is compounded by being close to it. It elevates the question of what happens afterwards to an existential moment. But we all wonder about it much of the time, at the edges of our consciousness. How can we not, since it faces us all?

            The popular culture provides us with a cartoon version of heaven. There is an old bearded man in a white robe sitting on a cloud surrounded by other white-robed people looking terribly bored.

            Much fun is made about the requirements to get in. The typical cartoon has St Peter sitting at the entrance gate going through his book of approved invitees. One cartoon has an applicant fumbling through his cell phone muttering that he can’t find the right password.

            Another has a grateful lady gushing her appreciation, wondering whether it was her good works or her charitable contributions that got her in? St Peter checks his records and tells her, “no, it was on the recommendation of your cat.”

            We expect to be reunited with our pets that we liked, along with our relatives, whether we liked them or not. One cartoon has a long line waiting at St Peter’s door, and next to it is one marked “Pre-Check,” where dogs are joyously bounding through unhindered.

            All this is an elaboration on a Persian concept, pairidaēza, from which we get the word “paradise.” It literally means a walled garden and was the notion of an elegant afterlife in ancient Persia. It became refined in Zoroastrianism, were the two regions of hell and heaven were imagined. Your good deeds would get you upstairs to heaven, your bad ones down to the basement hell.

            Donald Trump has famously said that he wants to get into heaven. He also wants to receive a Nobel Prize. We’ll see if he has any luck with either.

            Early Christianity was conflicted about the Zoroastrian concepts of heaven and hell, even though they had gained popularity throughout the ancient Mediterranean world. This was during the time when Christianity was emerging from its cocoon as a small Jewish sect into a world religion spread widely by the Apostle Paul.

            Paul and other early Christians accepted the prevailing idea of ancient Israel, that the dead would lay dead until the Last Judgement. Then at the end of time the Messiah would return, the trumpet would sound and those who were deemed worthy to be saved would rise up “incorruptible,” meaning they would have perfect new bodies, and take their roles in a new reality.  

            The texts of the New Testament gospels, however, showed influences from the Persian and Greek influences of the Mediterranean world. The word translated into English as “heaven” appears 70 times in the Gospel of Matthew, for example. It talks about the “kingdom of heaven,” and praying to “Our Father, who art in heaven.”

            The Greek word that is translated as “heaven” is ουρανός (ouranos). It is the basis of the English word “aeronautical,” and is related to the Greek word aeros, from which we get the English word “air.”

            Ouranos, translated as “heaven,” originally meant air, but it also meant air-up-there, or sky, as in “the heavens.” It also meant air within, or breath.

            The notion of internal air, or breath, was deemed crucial to life, and therefore in many ancient traditions, including ancient Israel, it was the essence of life itself. In the first chapter of the biblical book of Genesis, the creation of the earth is described by the act of God bringing life into the planet by blowing his breath upon it (Genesis 1:2).

            Many versions of the bible translate the Hebrew word for breath, ruach, as “spirit.” Thus in these translations the second verse of Genesis reads, the “spirit of God moved over the face of the waters.”

            The idea of breath and spirit, were, in fact, intertwined. In the Gospel of John, Jesus is reported to have compared the idea of the Holy Spirit to wind. Like the Holy Spirit, the wind “blows where it wishes” (John 3:8).

            The Greek word for spirit that appears in the Bible is pneuma, which also means “air.” It is the source of the term “pneumatic,” as in air-filled tires, or “pneumonia,” a disease of our air organ, the lungs.

            Back to the idea of heaven. The fact that the Greek word in the Bible was linked with “air,” and thence to “spirit,” gives us a clue to its meaning. It could mean that it was up there in the sky, in the heavens.

            But it could also mean that it was a realm of pure spirit. This would mean that the early Christian notion of heaven was an alternative reality of spirit, as contrasted with the material world.

            There is one other term related to life after death that is frequently found in the New Testament: eternity. In the Gospel of John it is used more than seventeen times.

            The Greek word translated as eternity is “aionios.” It literally means “of an age.” The contexts in which it is used, however, suggest that it means “age after age,” or a timelessness without beginning and end. Hence the English word “eternity” to translate it.

            Put this concept together with the meaning of heaven as pure spirit, and you have the notion of a timeless realm of non-materiality. Eternal spirit.

            Interestingly, modern physics points in the same direction. I have been trying to understand quantum physics, though without much success. At one point in reading a wonderful book by the physicist Carlo Rovelli, I stumbled upon a sentence indicating that the idea of time was not fundamental to theories of quantum gravity. What? Time and space is all we humans know about the world around us. How can we conceive of a world without time?

According to many quantum theories, time could be an emergent phenomenon, arising from the entanglement of quantum objects. How we perceive space could also be emergent, not essential to basic untangled quanta.

            This suggests that from the quantum theoretical perspective the deepest reality is a timeless one. It is a timeless realm of non-materiality. That sounds to me like “eternal spirit.”

            I have always suspected that the reality that we perceive cannot possibly be the only dimensions of existence. It is why we grow-ups flounder when children ask, “where were we before we were born?” and “what is beyond the sky?”

That is why I enjoy the efforts of religious traditions throughout the ages to imagine alternative realities. I am similarly grateful to modern science for broadening our thinking about the nature of things beyond our human limitation of thinking only in the dimensions of time and space.

            Does this help us think about what will happen when we die? I don’t know about you, but it comforts me to know that there is a substratum of reality, a timeless realm, that has always been there and will always be there. It is that state that is at the essence of all things, including ourselves, now and after we die. Eternal spirit, we come to you.