A few weeks ago I was called to the bedside of an old friend who had just died. I was struck again by the thought I always get at such times, that even though I can recognize the them, there’s something very different; the person I knew is not there. I remember the surprise in my sister-in-law’s voice when we got to the funeral home and saw her father laid out just after he’d passed away. She said: ‘It’s not him!’ I thought she was in some state of denial and really thought it was someone else’s body. But then she explained that she knew it was her dad’s body, but it wasn’t her dad.
I think most of us in that situation are struck by the same thing. It always makes me think of something C.S Lewis said: ‘You don’t have a soul, you are a soul. You have a body.’ And instinctively we know that though that body is now dead, the soul that animated it still lives.