Endings and Beginnings :: Personal Narrative Essays

Endings and Beginnings   Death, while in many respects an end, actually serves as more of a first base for all al nonpareil the most pessimistic of religions or philosophies. Even Socrates, at one time near the end of his life, at least, felt this sort of hopefulness. According to Plato, on his destructionbed subsequently having drunk the hemlock, Socrates mumbled these last words to Crito I owe a cock to Asclepius do not forget it. In his time it was customary to offer a cock to Asclepius, the God of Healing, upon recovering from a sickness, so at a time of impending death Socrates was actually thinking of healing in one way or another and beginning anew. When he confronts the idea of his own death earlier, however, in Platos Apology, he says If I were to claim to be wiser than my neighbor in any respect, it would be this that not be possessed ofing any real knowledge of what comes after death, I am also conscious that I do not possess it. On his deathbed, then, Socrates seems to be offering the cock just in case, a common reason for religion for many dying people.   All religions have death rituals or hopeful ideas of where they will end up after their death Hindus seek to escape repeated reincarnation by practicing yoga, by adhering to Vedic scriptures, and by devotion to a personal guru Buddhists seek a state of living Nirvana by following the path of clearness--if they are not perfectly righteous then they repeat another lifetime that is either good or bad depending upon their actions (karma) in their previous life deliverymanians believe that if they take Jesus Christ as their savior they may gain access to heaven after their life on earth. Joseph Campbell believed that all of the worlds religions are tied together by the likeness of their myths. Stories of creation, holy trinities, resurrections, deaths, and heavens repeat over and over again in slightly different forms. He believed, then, that all the worlds religions are the same, bu t theyre cloaked in different masks that betray the prejudices of the culture. One thing all religions have in common, however, is this When we die, we all go somewhere else in one form or another.   The beginning of a thing is its birth. The end of that thing is its death. Within the broad framework of our lives--the coordinate system that begins at age zero and completes some sort of bicycle when our bodies stop breathing--we experience an infinite number of