Beloved, you may have always welcomed good ideas about death. You have heard that you have had the experience of death a time or two before, yet you don’t recall, and you may want to avoid the subject of death altogether. You are inclined to put it off. You hesitate about what may proceed death more than the actual moment of saying goodbye this time around.

Truly, you have had the tendency to hoard life. You are reluctant to turn life in. Given a choice, you might hold onto life forever. You would teeter on the precipice of death as long as you could.

You may not have loved every moment of life. Still, You don’t want to sign off and let go of your toe-hold.

Although there may have been times when you theoretically would have liked to sign off on life on a trial basis, you never did take the step. You might not now even if a trial basis happens to be available.

Look, you haven’t trusted life, and you don’t quite trust death either.

Of course, concerning death, the burning fires may be rumors and hearsay. You’ve also heard that the bad place may actually occur in life on earth anyway.

What you could look forward to is mingling in Heaven with Christ and Buddha and all the others of note and God Himself, of course, and the angels and seeing once again all who in life meant so much to you and you have longed for with all your heart to see and catch up on old times. You wonder if you really have to continue with crying. You like to think that God could provide less than sadness surrounding death.

What makes the first entrance into death so difficult is that, at least initially, it’s all or nothing. So, in this sense, you take your chances. Another life may not be guaranteed a golden one to you. Ouch, there are no money-back guarantees.

You don’t know, for a fact, that you are given choices or even a complaint department to go to. If there were a complaint department to go to, it might be so full, and it might take a lifetime before you would reach your turn in line.

Given the odds, you might give up on dying and just roll over and go back to sleep before going through any more thinking it through.Tomorrow is another day.

You do wish you could think of death as a beginning rather than a departure. Your situation is that you just never know. Death might come with a blank slate.

To the best of your knowledge, there are no try-outs, no dress rehearsals, no choosing beforehand. You just take your chances. There are no signed guarantees. How do you really know that death can be sweet? In death, there are no bibliographies, no order forms, and as best as you can tell, no trying on or refittings on request. It appears that there are no refunds. You just don't know.