A parable*:
In a mother’s womb were two babies. One asked the other: “Do you believe in life after birth?” The other replied, “Why, of course. There has to be something after birth. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we will be later.”
“Nonsense” said the first. “There is no life after delivery. What kind of life would that be?”
The second said, “I don’t know, but there will be more light than here. Maybe we will walk with our legs and eat from our mouths. Maybe we will have other senses that we can’t understand now.”
The first replied, “That is absurd. Walking is impossible. And eating with our mouths? Ridiculous! The umbilical cord supplies nutrition and everything we need. But the umbilical cord is so short. Life after delivery is to be logically excluded.”
The second insisted, “Well I think there is something and maybe it’s different than it is here. Maybe we won’t need this physical cord anymore.”
The first replied, “Nonsense. And moreover if there is life, then why has no one has ever come back from there? Delivery is the end of life, and in the after-delivery there is nothing but darkness and silence and oblivion. It takes us nowhere.”
“Well, I don’t know,” said the second, “but certainly we will meet Mother and she will take care of us.”
The first replied “Mother? You actually believe in Mother? That’s laughable. If Mother exists then where is She now?”
The second said, “She is all around us. We are surrounded by her. We are of Her. It is in Her that we live. Without Her this world would not and could not exist.”
Said the first: “Well I don’t see Her, so it is only logical that She doesn’t exist.”
To which the second replied, “Sometimes, when you’re in silence and you focus and you really listen, you can perceive Her presence, and you can hear Her loving voice, calling down from above.”
The questions this parable raises are profound but so common and seemingly unanswerable that they easily become platitudes. Questions like “What am I here for?”, “What am I meant to do with this brief existence?”, “What is death and what, if anything, awaits me on the other side?”
One implication of the story is that what we call life is a preparatory stage for something much bigger, more unbounded and free. Whether or not this has any basis, the practical sensibility rings true. What am I preparing for, and how am I meant to prepare?
An undeniable fact upon which everyone agrees is the fact of death itself. Whether one is a staunch materialist or of a more spiritual or religious bent doesn’t matter. We know from direct experience that every being that is born goes through a longer or shorter cycle of life, and dies. Regardless of what I believe awaits me in “the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveler returns,” the fact of death provides an inevitable event for which to prepare.
Spiritual traditions of every stripe say the same thing about how to prepare for death: Die before you die. Though this sounds morbid and evokes images of suffering and self-denial I don’t think this is the essence of the task. Rather I think it is to see and strive to loosen one’s grasp on anything that we will be required to leave behind as we die.
With death, I leave what I call my life. This includes my house and car, my espresso machine and Persian rug, my books and original signed Eisenstadt photo. I leave my cat, my friends, my wife and children and parents. I leave my accomplishments, degrees, positions, identity; my beliefs and opinions, my thoughts, my joys and pleasures and suffering. And, of course, I have to prepare to let go of the attachment to my body with all its capabilities, pleasures, and comforts.
At the same time, I am alive! And while I am alive I want to enjoy all aspects of embodiment. So the task appears paradoxical, to be in life but not of life. In other words, can I live fully, and at the same time aspire to and strive toward an ideal or value that is not required by anything in life?
Not that a flattering epitaph or eulogy is any kind of goal, but a funeral is often a good indicator of how someone has lived. One feels the influence of a person’s life in the state and reflections of the people present for the event. The question of how to die becomes one of how to live.
*published by Wayne Dyer based on a longer short story by Pablo Molinero
This article appears in November 2025.
