Carnett: Shakespeare’s Hamlet asks a common question

Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the prince of Denmark, is accused of being excessively morose, but he asks a question common to us all.

In his “To be or not to be” soliloquy, he ponders aloud what it is to die. Have we all not wondered that?

My advice on the matter is, frankly, inadequate because I have yet to trod that existential corridor. It so happens, however, that I’m now entertaining thoughts of death’s propinquity in my own life. I’ve lost a dozen friends in the past year.

Twelve! That got my attention.

There has been an excess of books written in recent years on near-death experiences. Persons claiming to have died and gone to Heaven author them. I’ve read several and am convinced that some are rubbish.

But others leave me scratching my head.

Like the 3-year-old boy who had emergency surgery, experienced complications and afterward began to describe talking with Jesus and with others he couldn’t possibly have had knowledge of. There was an older sister who’d been miscarried or a man who was involved in a horrific head-on crash and, after he was pronounced dead at the scene by rescue workers, came back 90 minutes later claiming to have been to Heaven.

There was an orthopedic surgeon who drowned in a kayaking accident, was trapped underwater for 15 to 25 minutes and reported being accompanied by “heavenly beings” to Heaven.

What’s this preoccupation with Heaven? Some have accused Christians of being so heavenly minded that they’re no earthly good.

Christian apologist and Oxford don, C.S. Lewis, thinks otherwise.

“A continual looking forward to the eternal world is not, as some moderns think, a form of escapism or wishful thinking,” he wrote. “But [it’s] one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were … those who thought most of the next.

“It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.”

I was privileged to sit next to two great men as they died: my father and my father-in-law. I prayed and read Scriptures aloud as they went. There was no drama, no hysteria. Only peace.

Stephen, the first martyr of the New Testament, was stoned to death after Christ’s resurrection for his beliefs. The Book of Acts records the incident: “[Stephen] gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at God’s right hand; and he said, ‘Look! I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at God’s right hand.’”

What a way to go!

Augustine, a fourth-century bishop and theologian, approached death with equanimity.

“As Augustine lay dying,” wrote his friend, Possidius, “he ordered those psalms of David which are especially penitential to be copied out, and when he was very weak, he used to lie in bed facing the wall where the sheets of paper were put up, gazing at them and reading, and copiously and continually weeping as he read.”

Does the life one leads have anything to do with their manner of death?

Joseph Stalin, the butcher of millions was, at the end, deeply disturbed.

“The death agony was horrible,” wrote his daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva who was at the bedside. “At what seemed like the very last moment he suddenly opened his eyes and cast a glance over everyone in the room. It was a terrible glance, insane or perhaps angry and full of the fear of death.

“Then something incomprehensible and awesome happened that to this day I can’t forget and don’t understand. He suddenly lifted his left hand as though he were pointing to something above and bringing down a curse on us all. The gesture was incomprehensible and full of menace, and no one could say to whom or at what it might be directed.”

A final rattle, and then … what?

One day we shall know.

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JIM CARNETT, who lives in Costa Mesa, worked for Orange Coast College for 37 years.