The body of my maternal grandmother, Jane Ellen Overall, died this last week on Wednesday, April 16, 10:03pm, at the age of 82.

I was taught to believe that her spirit lives on and is now reunited with her husband, my grandfather, who passed away over twenty years ago. On some level, I want to believe that. It would have made her happy.

On another level, I have to admit that I don’t know, and may never know, if our spirits continue, shaped by our physical lives and personality, after our bodies die.

I know what I don’t believe — in a heaven of eternal reward and a hell of eternal punishment. They don’t fit with my concept of the Ultimate nor with my experience of life. If life is a combination of a myriad of experiences, then I would expect the afterlife, or future lives, or whatever if there is anything, to be a similar combination. I suspect that anything eternally without change would be numbing after a while. And the universe is too varied for that.

Perhaps when we die, we get what we expect — a kind of mentally constructed reality that lasts as long as we need it to. That might be nice, or not, depending on what one expects consciously and unconsciously.

Perhaps when we die, the part of us that is not physical regains its full non-physical awareness. Perhaps there are things that can only be experienced and perceived within our human form, and things that can only be experienced and perceived in non-physical existence. One is not better than the other — just different.

All of this assumes that there is a non-physical, or spiritual, or energetic, part of us that survives after the physical body dies. For the most part, I do believe that. But there is a niggling uncertainty that I have struggled to live with. Perhaps we all do.

Because really, truthfully, we do not know.

But because it was her truth, and her dream, I wish my grandparents happiness together again in each other’s arms.