Or, more accurately, do Boomers think Heaven is an option at the end of the trail?

According to an article in the latest edition of AARP Magazine, most Americans over fifty ... 73% ... believe in life after death, and 86% of those figure Heaven is a likely destination, even though only 70% would say the same about hell.

Although many in our generation looked askance at the Pearly Gates during our youth, something about passing the half-century mark has a lot of Boomers rethinking their youthful skepticism. The rethink comes partially from an end of enchantment with all things science, and an understanding that some questions just can't be answered ahead of time no matter how much research time the science guys put in.

The whole Pearly Gate concept is subject to a lot of speculation, as some see Heaven as a place, while others consider it more a "state of being", which is not the same as New York.

‘A copyeditor I once knew insisted that you should always capitalize the word Heaven. “Heaven,” he explained, “is a place. Like Poughkeepsie.”

Those who think it might be NY-like have some definite ideas on the place. As one New Hampshire resident states confidently: 'It’s always a beautifully clear day, and sunny, with great landscaping.”

Although 88% of people are confident of getting their ticket punched for passage through the gates, most figured only 64% of the rest of us will be as fortunate, and some calculate a whole lot less company.

“Fifteen percent,” says Ira Merce of Lakeland, Florida.

Twenty-three percent of responders go with the idea of reincarnation, and most of them are Boomers. According to one professor emeritus of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, that figure fifty years ago would have been about one percent, so it's certainly our generation that has expanded beliefs to include more Eastern concepts of life after death into personal perspectives.

More than half of the people polled believe in ghosts or spirits, and 38% of those claim an encounter of some sort.

As a sidebar to this story, there is a short piece on near-death experiences, those occasions in which a person is physically dead for a period of time, then revived. Although some claim the very similar 'white light' accounts are nothing more than a chemical response to certain stimuli, other experts are unconvinced that there's not more going on.

Some of the most intriguing findings come from Pim van Lommel, a retired cardiologist from the Rijnstate Hospital in Arnhem, Netherlands, who followed 344 survivors of cardiac arrest; 18 percent reported having had NDEs while their brains showed no wave activity. This perplexes van Lommel because, he says, “according to our current medical concepts it’s impossible to experience consciousness during a period of clinical death.”

Intriguing as this all is ... and like most of us, I can spend hours in contemplation of the myriad facets of the whole death and dying thing ... I must admit that I sometimes puzzle over the debate. After all, this is THE one question we're all absolutely certain to get the answer to, and very likely sooner than we're ready for it.

It does seem, however, that whatever one believes, what is truly important has much more to do with how we live than what happens when we die.

Graphic credit ... sorry, I couldn't resist.