Nearly all people who are religious believe in afterlife, reincarnation, heaven and hell, or the soul.  These are the Top 3 most popular viewpoints regarding what is happening with my dad right now, who has been dead for 28 days exactly.

1. Christianity: So my dad, along with 2.4 billion other people, was a Christian. Obviously what he would have wanted is Heaven. According to his beliefs, he is hanging out golfing in the best style, beyond any perfect golf experience imaginable, with other Righteous Christians who loved golf.  On this course, every game is a new perfect game as one waits for the Resurrection of the Dead and Life Everlasting and the return to the New Earth, a Pangaea of golf course perfection.
2. Definitely not a Muslim, and in fact, fearful of Muslim terrorists infiltrating our borders- yes, I am embarrassed by this fact and I blame it on his being a middle-aged, over-medicated veteran and a viewer of FOX-yet if 1.7 billion people who practice Islam are correct, then my dad is very restless in his grave right now, awaiting a golf tourney in Jahannam, where it is hotter than Death Valley at Noon on Tuesday. In August. No worries. My dad loved the heat. What he didn’t like was double-bogeying every hole. Here he would be condemned to suffer a bad game of golf for all eternity. Which is why I know my dad isn’t there because he lived a good life and deserves a good next whatever…
3. One billion people believe the Lord Krishna who said that just as a man discards his old clothes and wears new ones; similarly the soul discards the old body and takes on a new one.  This would explain the progression of animals that tried to get into my parents house in the 4 days following his violent, sudden death. I have no doubt that my dad will have more good karma than bad karma in his next lives to come.

I fall into a combination of religious ideas. Intellectually, I know nothing about these ideas and I don’t practice religion, but I will lay out for you the sum of my  honest beliefs.  Death is not the opposite of life. Life IS everlasting. We are all trying to find our way home, we humans just have different ideas of what that home looks like. And maybe the end of everyone’s spiritual journey looks like they want it to, but a million times better and after all life lessons are learned.  Taking that in to consideration, any current view held on the afterlife is very limited. Ask me again if you see me hanging out in  Sheol or Hades awaiting my own day of reckoning.

The soul belongs to the spiritual realm which originates with God. A soul is born again and again, until it can merge back with God. According to the Sikh scriptures, and the 30 million people who believe them, the human being is the closet form to God and the best opportunity for a soul to merge back with God. “Nothing dies, nothing is born, everything is ever-present, it just shifted form”.  The soul is never born and never dies because it is a part of God and hence not subject to life and death. We are just changing from one form into another, climbing the higher planes of existence until we reach that perfect state and become whole once again.

My dad has moved on; shifted forms; entered a new realm to continue to work through the karma that has troubled him. He will get home.  Maybe we will even arrive together.