Pastor Edward Markquart of Seattle tells about a poem titled, "The Midnight of March 31st."  It's a story about a drunken truck driver. Markquart imagines this driver trucking across Eastern Washington.  Finally he comes . . . in his mind . . . to the end of the highway . . . [The highway] seems to stop at the top of a hill that he can't see over . . . it is impossible for him to imagine that the road goes on.  And so he pulls off the highway and into a tavern and shouts to everyone:  "People, the road stops here.  The road stops here.  It doesn't go any farther. That's impossible." 

And everybody in the tavern laughs. They tell him that road goes all across Washington and even across the United States.  But the drunken truck driver is convinced the road goes no farther than the hill he can't see over.  

Then Markquart adds these wise words, "By analogy, many people drive out of our church and they drive up highway #99 after the funeral, and they drive into Washington Memorial Cemetery, and the road pulls right up to a grave which is carved out of the ground on the top of a hill.  And many people think: the road stops here; the road stops here; there is no more; it is impossible for the road to go any farther."

But, of course, the road does go farther. Death is not the end of the journey. There is more beyond. A healthy approach to death is to deal with it as a time of transition. Death is but a journey from this world to the next.