What (if anything) happens when we die? This is a question that human beings have been pondering since time immemorial. As health professionals, we come face to face with death every day. She follows us, side by side, an invisible certainty, lurking in our clinics and on our wards. An inevitable consequence of life, the heavy price we must pay for our existence, is the knowledge that, one day, we too will die. As a young doctor, I was constantly perplexed by the presence of death and the meaning of life.

I recall a day over a decade ago, where I was talking to a patient who had been on my ward for several weeks. We were chatting as I took blood; then out of the blue, he went into cardiac arrest. Following a prolonged resuscitation attempt, my previously conscious, sentient patient whom I’d got to know, was gone. Dead. Pupils fixed and dilated. No heart sounds. No breath sounds. No response to pain. Life extinct. The body that lay before me, was not the person I was speaking to moments earlier. It was a shell. A vessel. Just a ‘body’. Where did ‘he’ go?

I didn’t grow up in a religious family. In fact, my dad and his three brothers are staunch atheists. They were positive they knew what happened when we died. As a young impressionable adolescent, the overarching life lesson for my younger brother, my cousins, and I can be summed …