Existence After Death

Questions about what comes after death are raised by the novel The Testament of Mary. Not only does Mary wonder in pair of places what her dead loved ones are experiencing she also wonders what sort of experience Lazarus had before he was brought back to life.

Early on in the novel Mary indicates that she spent some of her Sabbath time thinking about what happened to a person after death. She indicates that on these days “there was always time to wonder about what was beyond us in the sky or what world lay buried in the hollows of the earth” (17).

The images that Mary got of her mother were otherworldly as she imagined her mother “struggling” (17) to reach out from “somewhere very dark” (17). Mary imagines a dark cavern with “things flitting and flying and there was the sound of the rumbling earth...