Requiescat In Pace
Anonymous; Rota Typography, Lecco, Italy (publisher)
1898
chromolithograph
10.5 x 6.4 cm
credit: From the collection and courtesy of Pierluigi Stradella

DEATH

John 3:16 is probably the most familiar verse in the New Testament and the central promise of Christianity.

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

William R. Clark (1938– ), Chairman of the Department of Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles, concludes his short book Sex and the Origins of Death as follows:

We may come to understand death, but we cannot change this single, simple fact: in the larger scheme of things, it matters not a whit that some of these somatic cells [the cells that comprise our bodies] contain all that we hold most dear about ourselves: our ability to think, to feel, to love—to write and read these very words. In terms of the basic process of life itself, which is the transmission of DNA from one generation to the next, all of this is just so much sound and fury, signifying very little, and quite possibly nothing.

At the end of the chapter “Mythology of the Beyond” in his lush Tragic Sense of Life, the Catholic existentialist philosopher Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) writes:

We must needs believe in the other life, in the eternal life beyond the grave, and in an individual and personal life, in a life in which each one of us may feel his consciousness and feel that it is united, without being confounded, with all other consciousnesses in the Supreme Consciousness, in God; we must believe in that other life in order that we may live this life, and endure it, and give it meaning….

The symbol of the Sacred Heart of Jesus speaks to the fears and hope that contemplation of death engenders. Sacred Heart holy cards, like most holy cards, are funereal.

The reverse of this funeral holy card reads (from the Italian):

“On the day of 31 July 1898 the life of Luigi Carsaniga, not yet eleven, whose intelligence, grace, and sensibility was the delight of his parents, was taken from their affection and hopes.”

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