When I was a kid, I saw him every day.

The Jesus depicted here will soon be resurrected, which means he's a mixture of being both dead and alive at the same time.

I went to school, and Mass, at Christ the King Roman Catholic Church in the heart of Hollywood, California.

It's where I received my first communion, where I met some of my best friends, and learned to ask questions about death and the afterlife.

It seems that every culture and religion in the world has some sort of concept of the afterlife.

Being dead, and alive, in a different form at the same time.

But my question is, how does the belief in an afterlife or lack thereof actually help us begin to process death?

My journey begins here in church, but most of what I learned about death and grief and the afterlife, I learned through my family.

At home, I learned a very special tradition from the women in my life that goes back hundreds of years.

It's something that a lot of people across the world practice.

It's a tradition that involves nine days of prayer called a Novena.

My family believes that when we put this into practice, we help people who are passed over make it safely to the other side.

This is my Tia Tara and her daughter, my cousin Roxie, who have cultivated the tradition and plan of passing it down.

The Novena consists of the whole family getting together with a big spread of food and through prayer and song.

Large groups begin to help the spirits pass over, and every day for nine days, we all get together and do it all again.

#*Singing Novena Prayer#* Whether you do or not, the fact is that most folks believe that there's a part of us that goes somewhere after we die.

But of course, visions of the afterlife have varied a lot throughout history and across cultures.

For example, in Tibet, one of the most prominent religions is Mahayana Buddhism, and Buddhists typically believe that life after death is literally another life that we're all constantly reincarnated until we reach Nirvana, a state of enlightenment.

Likewise, in some African cultures, like the Akan of Ghana, that is seen as passing into a new phase of life.

In another version of this world there the dead can stay connected to their communities and families as ancestor spirits, or if they had unfinished business in the mortal realm.

According to cultures like the Yoruba of West Africa they might be reincarnated to and all around the world.

Ideas about the afterlife have been shaped by the influences of Christianity and Judaism.

Christians also tend to believe in heaven.

And many think there's a hell too.

A place where unjust souls are punished instead of rewarded.

These beliefs are especially common here in the U.S. A survey done in 2021 found that more than 80% of Americans believe in some sort of afterlife.

About 75% of them believed in some version of what they called heaven.

And even 30% of folks who said they weren't affiliated with any religion still believe in an afterlife.

But if you ask me, it's Oprah and Gayle who will be welcoming us at the Pearly Gates and maybe Steadman, if we're lucky.

What I want to know is why.

Why is a belief in the afterlife so widely held and what purpose does it serve?

Now, I'm no anthropologist, but I know one.

So I took my questions to Delande Justinvil at American University in Washington.

How does the belief help us process that individually and in groups?

It operates like a release valve, if that makes sense, with these different rituals across various cultures.

The processing of death has so much to do with taking the those who are mourning and grieving through the emotion that they're feeling, while also understanding that this is a celebration or at least a space of honoring the worth in the value and the love of that life had brought to them.

Yeah, I mean, you've already answered my next question in that it acts almost as a balm of what people are having and feeling through their grief.

But why is the belief in the afterlife so widespread?

It's so widespread because of its how it defines our capacity for living.

But also it has a conception of afterlife as continuity, as legacy building.

The work that you've done or that you've community done.

How do you want to see that continued on?

How do those who came before, how did this came after?

How does my end tie into this culture we created that we propped up all these ways of life, ways of being in and being with one another.

How do we keep that going?

How do we build upon that even after I'm gone?

Or, almost as if it gives things meaning.

Yeah, and I think that's something that, like humans really want to do with everything in our life.

Everything.

Yeah.

What's the earliest known expression of belief in an afterlife?

First, I should say that it depends on what sense of afterlife you're, one is most attuned to.

There are some who say that the closest translation to the word afterlife, especially as a means of continuity of life is accredited to certain histories of Judaism.

Well, we also know that we can go back to the ancient to the classical era, where the ancient Romans were a myriad, you know, funeral rituals, burial practices, cremations, verses, intimations, and these grand gestures at the intersection of the relationship between the afterlife and the supernatural.

You've now entered this phase where you might have to appease a God to ensure your passage.

You won't have to fend yourself off from creatures who are guarding underworld passages or whatever the hereafter looks like for you.

We have this in text, we have this in visual even pretexts.

Millennia before that, the ancient Egyptians and their hieroglyphics on the processes of death also very heavily related to religious beliefs and their different deities.

So, Delande, what is your interpretation of the afterlife?

Lately, one of my main interpretations of the afterlife is how we in our everyday constitute the afterlives of those who have gone before us.

And how the work that we do and the ways that we live are themselves ritual practices of ancestral veneration and how we show the, our appreciation for the work that's come before us and how we commit to the work after us.

Wow.

Was that nice enough?

That was beautiful.

That was beautiful.

I loved it.

It was great.

There are as many beliefs about the afterlife as there are people in the world.

Some people prefer nine days of prayer.

Others believe that the only life is the one we live here.

No matter the belief, the hope is that you can continue to cherish yourself and each other in the moment so that when death does come in, the words of death dula, Alua Arthur It was a life worth dying for.

Or, as my bestie says, get a little messy and do it for the plot.