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Your Dead Loved Ones​—Where Are They?

ALEC was devastated. Within a week, he lost two of his friends. One of them, Nevil, died from a gunshot wound. The other, Tony, was killed in an automobile accident. Questions that had not bothered him before now plagued the 14-year-old South African boy. ‘Why do people have to die? And what happens after death?’ he wondered.

On his way to Nevil’s funeral, Alec sincerely hoped he would get answers to these questions. “But,” he recalls, “the priest just read from a book and said that Nevil had gone to heaven. Then, at the graveside, he said we await the resurrection. I was confused. If Nevil was in heaven, how could he be awaiting a resurrection?”

Later that same day, Alec attended Tony’s funeral. The ritualistic service was held in a language that he could not understand. Yet, the hysterical behavior of some mourners convinced Alec that no comfort was given. “That night,” he explains, “I was terribly upset. I felt helpless and lost. No one could give satisfactory answers to my questions. For the first time in my life, I really wondered whether there is a God.”

Each year millions, like Alec, lose loved ones in death. “Worldwide,” explains the 1992 Britannica Book of the Year, “there were 50,418,000 deaths in 1991.” And how many millions more have since died? Imagine the rivers of tears shed by the bereaved survivors! Adding to their sorrow is the confusion caused by conflicting views about death.

Thus many, like Alec, become disillusioned and doubt whether there is any basis for hope in a future life after death. According to the Encyclopedia of Religions, “in all ages, thoughtful men have stood apart from the multitude, . . . doubting how the individual soul or life can exist apart from the individual brain and body.”

Interestingly, the above encyclopedia admits that the religious theory of an immortal soul existing apart from the body is not supported in the Bible. True, in a few places, the Bible does refer to a person’s “soul” as leaving and even returning to a dead body, but in these instances “soul” is used in the sense of “life,” lost or regained. (Genesis 35:16-19; 1 Kings 17:17-23) More often, the word “soul” is used in the Bible to describe visible creatures of flesh and blood, yes, living creatures. (Genesis 1:20; 2:7) Hence, the Bible repeatedly states that souls die. (Ezekiel 18:4, 20; Acts 3:23; Revelation 16:3) God’s Word says that once souls are dead, they “are conscious of nothing at all.”​—Ecclesiastes 9:5, 10.

On the other hand, the Bible does contain accounts of dead people being restored to life. In the case of Lazarus, this happened after he had been dead for four days. (John 11:39, 43, 44) What, though, will happen to people who died hundreds or thousands of years ago? Does their prospect for future life require that God resurrect the selfsame body they had when they died?

No. Such a thought is inconsistent with what happens to the atoms that make up a dead body. In time, some of these same atoms are absorbed by vegetation that, in turn, is consumed by other creatures and becomes part of their bodies.

Does this mean that there is no hope for people long dead? No. The Creator of our vast universe has an awesome, unlimited memory. Within his perfect memory, he has the capacity to store the personality and genetic traits of any dead human he chooses to remember. Moreover, Jehovah God has the power to recreate a human body with the exact genetic code of a person who has lived before. He can also place within it the memory and personality of the one whom he remembers, such as Abraham.

Almost two thousand years after the death of Abraham, Jesus Christ gave this assurance: “That the dead are raised up even Moses disclosed, in the account about the thornbush, when he calls Jehovah ‘the God of Abraham and God of Isaac and God of Jacob.’ He is a God, not of the dead, but of the living, for they are all living to him.” (Luke 20:37, 38) Besides Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, millions of other dead humans are alive in God’s memory, awaiting the coming resurrection. “There is going to be a resurrection of both the righteous and the unrighteous,” the Bible confirms.​—Acts 24:15.

A few weeks after his bereavement, Alec found the answers to his questions. One of Jehovah’s Witnesses called at his home and showed him what God’s Word says about death and about the resurrection. This comforted Alec and brought new meaning to his life.

Would you too like to learn more about the Bible-based hope of the resurrection? For example, will most resurrections take place in heaven or on earth? And what must a person do to gain God’s approval and experience the fulfillment of His wonderful promise that people may be reunited with dead loved ones?