The other night I got an email from a friend of mine who is a devout Muslim.  He and his wife had been scheduled to get together with my wife and me in a couple of days.  We had planned to walk through a forest preserve together, a prospect to which all of us were looking forward.
     Unfortunately, Hashim said, we would need to postpone our engagement.  One of his aunts was only a few hours from death in a hospital in Dallas, and he needed to leave immediately in hopes of seeing her before she expired.  I of course understood, and told Hashim that I would pray for him.
     Why did I say that I would pray?  I'm a Christian, not a Muslim.  I do not worship Allah, nor do I believe that Mohammad was the greatest of all prophets.  In times of the most severe human crises, however, one's religion doesn't matter.  It really doesn't.  Death is like that.  It's the final leveler of humanity, the one event which everyone experiences, and the one event which no one can prevent from happening.  Death's inevitability touches us all.
     Hashim and I could talk all day about our differing versions of the afterlife.  When we are looking at death's door, however, standing on this side of mortality, set to watch one of our loved ones step across that unfathomable abyss that is always hovering on the edge of earthly existence, what I want for him and his aunt to feel most is that God (or Allah, for Allah is simply the Arabic word for God) is there.  We are not alone.  As a life fades away, it, and those who survive it, can know that, more than ever, death, surely one of humanity's most heartbreaking experiences, is not the end.  God is there.