Dying With Dignity ACT

What happens after we die

Quotations about what happens after we die …

All things are made of atoms” They are everywhere and they constitute everything. They are fantastically durable. Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms – up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested-probably once belonged to Shakespeare …..and any other historical figure you care to name ……. So we are all reincarnations – though short lived ones. When we die, our atoms will disassemble and move off to finds new uses elsewhere – as part of a leaf or other human being or a drop of dew. Atoms themselves, however go on practically forever.
Bill Bryson’s, A Short History of Nearly Everything, 2003 Won the Aventis prize for Science books in 2004.


Virtually everything we see and touch and feel is made up of collections of particles that have been involved in interactions with other particles right back through time, to the Big Bang in which the universe as we know it came into being. The atoms in my body are made of particles that once jostled in close proximity in the cosmic fireball with particles that are now part of a distant star, and particles that form the body of some living creature on some distant, undiscovered planet. Indeed, the particles that make up my body once jostled in close proximity and interacted with the particles that now make up your body.
John Gribbin’s, In Search of Shrodinger’s Cat, First published in 1984.


The face of the earth is a graveyard, and so it has always been.

To earth each living thing restores when it dies that which has been borrowed to give form and substance to its brief day in the sun.
From earth, in due course, each new living being receives back again a loan of that which sustains life.

What is lent by earth has been used by countless generations of plants and animals now dead and will be required by countless others in the future …..

No plant or animal … can establish permanent right of possession to the materials which compose its physical body.
Paul B Sears, 1935, book Deserts on the March.