Foreword

Foreword O f all the stages through which a person will have to pass, death is the most certain. Yet, it is something that few people bother to seriously think about, leave alone prepare for. Everyone who is alive now will be dead sometime in the future. One day, the eyes of those who now see will fade and their tongues will freeze into silence. Every human being will one day be leaving this world, never to return, and will enter a world which he will never leave. Death is commonly defined as the end of life in an organism. Upon death, apparently all biological and other-related activities of a living being stop, including the mind and the senses. Research suggests that about 150,000 people die every day around the world. Throughout history, a great majority of people have believed that humans also have a soul in addition to the physical body and that the soul continues in the afterlife, after leaving the body. It is here that religion adds a very important aspect to the concept of death. That is, religion says that there is a very meaningful relationship between the pre-death and the post-death period of a human being. The period before death in