There was an Arabic proverb on every funeral that says, “Innah lillahi wa inna ilaihi rajiun,” so to say, as a man came from dust and so to dust he shall return.
For thousands of years death has taken the mind — as well as body, literally — of humankind and covered it with the sand of oblivion.
Death is sometimes seen as the end, just that, and often the door in which a man proceeds to the hereafter. In fact, many religions in the world see death not just a stop of blood circulation, ceasing of breathe, stop of heartbeat, or the dropping of body temperature but rather a part of process which a dead person has to undergo for him to cross the afterlife.
This is the reason why Christendom has the belief of Heaven, Islam has Jannat ul Firdaus, and dharmic religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism maintain the concept of Nirvana.
For millennia, several civilizations have given death significance so great that the ancient Egyptians built the Great Pyramids to house the mummies of their Pharaoh and how Chinese people sculpted countless Terracotta Army for their first Emperor Shi Huangti.
Humans are so afraid of what happens next when they die so they want something to hold on in the process. They build tombstones and statues of themselves to remind the people of who they are and what they have done when the angel of death finally comes.
But what really happens when we die?
Is it here really everything ends?
So what we were, what we are, and what we will be are just pointless timeframe lived out of boredom?
Is death really the emancipation from tyranny in this world?
But what if the old oppressors of before is also there where we are going?
Or will we just cease to exist into nothingness as how the universe we all know today started from Chaos?
Apparently, we do not know and we will never know what happens when we die.
All we know as of now with the advancement of technology is that, there are 55.3 million per year, 151,600 per day, 6,316 per hour, 105 per minute, and 1.8 persons per second dying as we speak.
The proverb of returning to dust that was poetically viewed as just a metaphor before has something more significance now.
After our body decomposes into dust along with other components like grains of sand, minerals, dead skin cells, tiny hairs, animal dander, and pollen grains, it will just be recycled into the same 13.8 billion years cosmic particles scientists believed to have carried the organic compounds that resulted to life on Earth.
The elements that we have in our body right now are probably the same elements of a star that have blown into a supernova, a moon that eclipsed the biggest planet, of an ocean that could hold an entire moon, of a volcano, of a flower as big as a house, or a dinosaur that came to extinction as a result of billions of years process before those dust turned to become your brain, your bones, your heart, and everything of you till you finally become dust again.
One never dies and just that, he just decides to come home. As what the proverb says:
“Man came from dust and so to dust he shall return.”
