An eternal soul

It doesn't make any logical sense, does it?

I am a sophisticated biological machine. My 'self'-hood is tied up in chemical potentials and electrical impulses and synapses and all these fantastic, remarkable systems working together to make me me.

I speak about the soul because it seems the only way to explain the depth and breadth of an emotional experience that seems to alter the essential self. But is there any real part of the concept that is actually - physically and empirically - true? The dualism of body and soul. Two entities tethered together until the one finally fails to provide sufficient host and the other escapes, somehow in tact and carrying all of those essential pieces of us into...where? heaven or hell?

My parents believe in these concepts - and my sisters, too. Most of the world believes in some form of life-after-death. I did once, as well, when I eagerly devoured Lewis and Tolkien and L'Engle's essays about the love of God and the salvation of Jesus Christ. Michelangelo painted the judgment on the altarpiece of the Sistine Chapel, with the dead called from their graves and the saints demanding justice and the sinners carted off across a Styxian river. But these things seem so illogical to me.

The ideas of an afterlife replete with punishment or reward seem so utterly absurd to me. They seemed particularly absurd to me when I stood on the edge of self-termination (and any time I return there). Hamlet may have worried that the Almighty set his hand against self-slaughter, but I worried that some good friend of mine would have to find and manage the carcass. That my family would have to face the horror of this decision. (If my need to terminate stems from unbearable pain, how could I therefore impose any terrible pain on someone I loved?)

Still, the concept of soul - even the concept of faith remain the only way that I have ever been able to describe what it was to be with and know Sjors. I felt so strongly that my soul knew his soul: as though we had existed for billions of years, linked together as companions through the creation and destruction of stars. It wasn't as though I was meeting him for the first time - but that I'd found him at last. And this is the reason for the depth and horror of the pain I experience every day, knowing that he is lost to me. That he lied to himself. That he lied to me. It feels like a rending - and his absence feels like some horrible wrongness. A loss of self. After long and dreadful months, the pain is still there as awful as if it had happened yesterday. How would this be the case if I did not have a soul, and his soul was not meant to be with mine?