Death and Life (Part 2)

For Carmel Ennis

What is it like to die?

This is a question I have been pondering for some time. In the first part I argued that Jesus Christ was so opposed to death that he brought people who were dead back to life again. I then posed this question about Jesus:

Did he know something about the consequences of death the rest of us don’t?¹

I believe he did. And I think I know what those consequences are - or can be.

Recently I have been reading two books about Near Death Experiences or NDEs.² Someone has an NDE when they appear to die, maybe because of serious illness or a bad accident, but return to life perhaps only a few minutes later with strange stories of what they experienced when they were ‘out of it’.

Both books make the astonishing claim that individual human consciousness survives physical death, that we don’t simply become ‘food for worms’. I say ‘astonishing’ even though believers in an afterlife won’t be shocked by this idea at all. But isn’t it surprising to find apparently sane and sober people like these two authors recounting what it is like to die?

Although stories of NDEs have been going around for centuries, the phenomenon has gained widespread attention only since the 1960s. One of the first modern proponents of NDEs was an American psychiatrist named George Ritchie. As a young soldier in hospital during World War 2, Ritchie ‘died’ for about 9 minutes before being revived by a physician. Decades later he set out in his book what he saw and heard during those 9 minutes.

Virgil is shown the way into the next world, as imagined by Gustave Doré (1832-1883) in his illustration for an edition of Dante Alghieri’s The Divine Comedy - an early account of an NDE?

One of those inspired by Ritchie was Dr Raymond Moody, another American psychiatrist, who wrote the second book I have been reading. In it he coined the term, Near Death Experience, to describe the extraordinary stories he collected from patients about what they saw and heard when they were temporarily ‘dead’.

Obviously neither of these books constitutes proof that life continues when we die. No one can ever know for sure what happens, if anything, after death. That is why we have debates, not only between atheists and believers, but between different kinds of believers, about this fundamental matter. All I can do here is state what I believe myself, which is that life does not end with our physical deaths.

But can these books tell us anything about what actually happens when our bodies stop working, in other words, when we die? Maybe other readers will glean a different message. Here is what has stayed with me from my reading.

Death has many great advantages over physical life, e.g. no bodily pain, being able to move around instantaneously. There is one terrible disadvantage however: after death it is impossible to communicate with any living person.

George Ritchie wrote about the dreadful sense of loneliness he experienced as he tried to make his presence felt after he ‘died’.

It is one thing to step unnoticed into a room where someone is sleeping, another altogether to have him look right at you and give no sign that you exist.³

Moody included this report by one of his NDE interviewees about the terrible effects of being both invisible and inaudible:

I was unable to touch anything, unable to communicate with any of the people around. It is an awesome, lonely feeling, a feeling of complete isolation. I knew that I was completely alone, by myself.⁴

However Moody went on to assert that this feeling of aloneness did not last very long. His subjects reported that they were soon joined by various ‘spirits’, some they recognised while others were unknown. These spirits indicated that they had come to help the ‘newbie’ to adjust to his or her new state in the afterlife. Nevertheless Moody reports a few exceptions to the pleasant memories of most of his interviewees.

As one woman said, “If you leave here a tormented soul, you will be a tormented soul over there, too.”⁵

In my view, this quotation underlines a flaw in Moody’s book. Those who spoke to him were, in the main, positive about what they had experienced. Any fear they had felt about dying was gone.

The reason why death is no longer frightening… is that after his experience a person no longer entertains any doubts about his survival of bodily death. It is no longer merely an abstract possibility to him, but a fact of his experience.⁶

It is not my intention to suggest that we should ever be frightened of dying. If Moody’s book dispels fear of death among its millions of readers, it will have done its job. But if you want anything more, like a representative picture of what transitioning from this world to the next actually feels like, look elsewhere.

The bottom line is that dying should not be a worry. But clearly, in the 21st century, it is more than a worry. A lot more.

Nowadays the prospect of death is so horrific for many people, particularly in the affluent west, that we will do virtually anything we are told in order to avoid it. The recent covid nonsense has surely taught us that. No, fear of death is unnecessary. But before we decide to ‘pass over’, as it were, we should be content to let go of all our earthly ties. Another extract from Ritchie’s book explains why:

I watched one woman of maybe fifty following a man of about the same age down the street. She seemed very much alive, agitated and tearful, except that the man to whom she was addressing her emphatic words was oblivious to her existence. “You’re not getting enough sleep. Marjorie makes too many demands on you. You know you’ve never been strong. Why aren’t you wearing a scarf? You should never have married a woman who thinks only of herself.” There was more, much more, and from some of it I gathered that she was his mother, in spite of the fact that they appeared so nearly the same age. How long had she been following him this way? Was this what death was like – to be permanently invisible to the living, yet permanently wrapped up in their affairs?⁷

Whatever about death, is this what hell is like?

George Ritchie again:

I had always thought of hell, when I thought about it at all, as a fiery place somewhere beneath the earth where evil men like Hitler would burn forever. But what if one level of hell existed right here on the surface - unseen and unsuspected by the living people occupying the same space? What if it meant remaining on earth but never again able to make contact with it?⁸

Thinking of that mother endlessly and helplessly chasing after her son, Ritchie concluded,

To want most, to burn with most desire, where you were most powerless – that would be hell indeed.⁹

Many years ago, as a young Catholic boy in a Christian Brothers’ school, I learnt to recite an ancient prayer called “The Apostles' Creed”. A line in that prayer comes to mind now:

He descended into hell.¹⁰

According to my old Catechism, the ‘he’ is Jesus Christ and refers to where he was during the brief period between crucifixion on Good Friday and resurrection on Easter Sunday. A question and answer later in the book sums up the official line (back then anyway!):

Where did Christ’s soul go after his death?

After Christ’s death his soul descended into hell: this was not the hell of the damned, but a place or state of rest called limbo.¹¹

As regular readers will know, I do not regard myself as a Christian. I believe Christianity was an attempt by unscrupulous forces to distort the life and teachings of Jesus Christ (whom I am convinced was a real person). But I also believe that the Catholic interpretation in my Catechism is not far off the mark. (You can find more of my thinking on religion and Jesus in Into the Memory Hole: Despatches from the “world of lies”.)

Is it possible that “tormented soul[s]”, to use the phrase from Moody’s book, are much more common than we think? What if Ritchie is correct about hell being here? What if this planet, this earthly life, is actually hell?

Did Jesus know all this when he came to show us that death is not an escape from an intolerable present? That we should cherish life? Is this why “He descended into hell”?

More in Part 3.

1. J. P. Bruce Says Hello! Death and Life (Part 1), Substack, 27 Jul 2025.

2. Raymond A. Moody, Life After Life: Survival of bodily death (London, 2016). George G. Ritchie, with Elizabeth Sherrill, Return From Tomorrow (Grand Rapids, MI, 2007).

3. Ritchie, Return from Tomorrow, p. 54.

4. Moody, Life After Life, p. 44.

5. Ibid, p. 131.

6. Ibid, p. 90.

7. Ritchie, Return from Tomorrow, pp. 67-8 (emphasis added).

8. Ibid, p. 72.

9. Ibid.

10. A Catechism of Catholic doctrine (Dublin, 1951), p. 1.

11. Ibid, p. 31.