As long as we have existed, we have wondered what happens when we die. Each generation must confront its fear and helplessness in the face of the fact that this self, which takes so much effort to construct and inhabit and nurture, this body that we’ve worn and washed and lived in, is likely to last, from start to finish, considerably less than a century. Responses to the prospect of dying take three principal forms: some believe that we shall be resurrected to pass eternity with intact bodies as the same people we were during our earthly sojourns; some believe that what survives is a "soul," or an essence, which leaves behind forever the dead and decomposing receptacle in which it resided; and some believe that death erases our snowflake lives entirely. Author Richard Schweid augments his research with interviews with theologians, farmers, medical examiners, preachers, rabbis, and imams.