Do we survive physical death?

Ian Wilson recounts the following anecdote in his The After Death Experience¹—

If the late Pope Paul VI had one particularly cherished personal possession, it was his bedside alarm-clock. 

A perfectly ordinary alarm-clock with lacquered brass frame and Roman numerals on a white face—for fifty-five years, he obsessionally insisted on taking it with him wherever he travelled. 

It was never known to be fast or slow, and was always set by him to give its tinny ring at precisely 6.30 a.m., just as it did on the morning of the last day of his life, Sunday, 6 August 1978, the Feast of the Transfiguration. Throughout the day, as physician Marco Fontana and other aides and officials watched Paul’s life ebb away, the clock ticked steadily at his bedside, neither reset, nor rewound. The Last Rites were given and at 9.40 that evening, just after Paul had feebly recited, but failed to finish the Lord’s Prayer, Fontana listened to his chest, felt his pulse, and announced—It’s over. 

At that precise moment, to the utter astonishment of all present, Paul’s ancient alarm shrilled throughout the bedroom. 

If we could understand exactly what happened in that extraordinary and well-attested moment, and in particular, whatever something of the Pope’s passing had sufficient energy to trigger that alarm, then the nature of any possible afterlife might be rather more encompassable within accepted science than it is at present. 

¹Ian Wilson, The After Death Experience, 1987, Sidgwick & Jackson, London, Chapter 14, Physics of the Non-Physical, 183