When I was in college, doing my undergraduate work, I took a class on death and dying. It was taught by a professor who had had a heart attack and come face to face with his own mortality. That was the most popular class in the entire psychology department. That was where I was introduced to the work of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, a psychologist who did qualitative research on the way people went through dying from a terminal illness. She theorised that they all progressed through various stages:

1. Denial: in which the person feels fine, they are going to beat this, they can't possibly really be dying, etc.

2. Anger: in which the person asks, "Why me?" and vents on God, other people, and the world.

3. Bargaining: in which a person tries to make a deal for a little more time; they will give their life savings, they will donate to a charity, whatever it takes.

4. Depression: the person slumps into a morose, despondent, vegetative state filled with hopelessness and a lack of enthusiasm or joy.

5. Acceptance: in which the person finds peace in yielding to mortality, which allows him or her to let go of worldly ties and concerns and to pursue, with whatever strength and awareness available, a select focus on personally meaningful activities.

Subsequent research established that while most people did experience these five 'stages', they did not necessarily take them in a strictly sequential manner. In other words, people cycled in and out of them, repeated some but not others, and some people actually skipped over one phase entirely on their way to another.

The threat of losing a loved one can also bring on these stages; one does not necessarily have to be the person diagnosed with a terminal illness. One might just be married to such a person. A loss is a loss. A death is a death. There is still denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance in various forms and intensities that a person will likely have to navigate.

And what of death accomplished? What happens when the death has occurred and loved ones must grieve? If they have had time to move through these stage-like experiences, then the acceptance makes grieving more a celebration of life, but if death has been sudden and unexpected, then it is much more difficult-as if denial, anger, bargaining, and depression were all piled simultaneously on top of one another, pressing one into the ground. What comes out as tears one moment, comes out as a kind of mindless euphoria the next. What comes out as deal making one moment comes out as depression the next. Sometimes it feels like two things are trying to happen at once. It's disorienting, disrupting, catastrophic, and disabling.

When I was a Navy Corpsman during the Vietnam War, I was with several men in their dying. They died in hospital beds. Each one died in a coma. I observed the body in chain-stokes breathing, heaving, throwing off life. They were like butterflies struggling to escape their cocoons.

I have often wondered what that moment of dying feels like. When the people jumped off the burning towers in New York, there were seconds before they hit the pavement below. Was it wind against your face and then sudden nothingness? It makes sense to me that the brain would sustain a sudden loss of consciousness. It would not be like fainting, because in fainting a person feels the blood draining out of his or her head; there is a sense of being off balance, dizzy or light headed, and the odd perception that time is slowing down and one is watching oneself fall. Then one 'wakes up' on the ground. I don't think the people who leaped to their deaths on 9/11 were aware of the moment when conscious life ceased, so I don't think they felt the intense pressure of hitting concrete or the pain we might imagine possible with that. Traffic accident victims report later that they cannot recall the actual moment of impact. Likewise, I suspect that the people who fell out of the sky on that doomed commuter flight, falling 800ft in five seconds, felt nothing when the plane nosed through that house and disintegrated in the earth.

I don't want to feel the panic and desperation of being underwater when I die. And I don't want to feel the pain of burning to death. However, I do want to watch what happens as I slip over from this side of life to the next.

I do not believe the soul, what today my colleagues in psychotherapy call the self, sleeps in unconsciousness at death. I believe we go awares into the presence of God. Jesus told the thief on the cross: "Today you will be with me in paradise." The Bible says that at death the body goes back to the dust of the ground and the spirit goes back to God who gave it. Jesus told a story about a man who died but then held a conversation with God about a relative living on earth. No, I believe there is a conscious existence after this form of life, and I believe it is the full development of our spiritual nature that awaits us.

It's not as if I'm going to be able to write my final term paper for that professor of long ago, as I'm sure he has died by now, and after I'm dead, I'm not coming back here to get graded. But I am curious, and I'm existential enough to want to watch what happens as I make the journey home, for my true home is in heaven. Here I'm just taking classes and passing through.