The Last Battle by CS Lewis (spoiler alert)

[Aslan said] "Your father and mother and all of you are—as you used to call it in the Shadow-Lands—dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning." 

And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. 

And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. 

But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

Final words of "The Last Battle" - the final volume of the Narnia Chronicles by CS Lewis. 

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Theologically; I find a great deal to like about this beautiful ending to the seven Narnia books. 

I like that it places the proper goal of our lives in the eternal realm of Heaven. And that Heaven is a beginning, not an end. 

I like that is places Heaven and eternal incarnated life necessarily on the other side of death. That this must be so and cannot be otherwise, is surely a fact of creation - else Jesus would not have needed to die to be resurrected. 

I don't much like the idea that this temporary mortal life is just the Shadow-lands; it must be a great deal more than just Shadows (a secondary and derivative emanation of the reality) - else mortal life would either not be necessary in the first place (just as shadows are not necessary for objects to exist); nor would it be prolonged for so many people - for so many decades. 

No. I regard this mortal life as real, important, eternal too - or, some aspects of it are potentially real, important and eternal. 

And after all, Jesus spent thirty-three years as a mortal Man, before moving on to the next and final stage. 

But classical Christian theology does a poor job of explaining why some people live mortally at all, or for so long; while other persons do not even get out of the womb. 

This is one of those things for which - if it is important to us - we must each work out an answer our-selves. 

None of the available "off the peg" theological explanations will do the job - either by not explaining enough, and not accounting for the necessity and variation of incarnated mortal experience; or by explaining too too much and implying that particular ad prolonged experiences of mortal life are always essential!