Is there really a contradiction in this text?

1. Do you agree with me that the highlighted parts of the following description are contradictive? the first one talks about the life after death and the second one about the lack of life after death.

2. In the first highlight the word "couple" is repeated twice. Does the first one refer to the young couple (living couple) and the second one to the old couple (the dead one)?

In a more recent work, Going Forth By Day (2002), Viola presents five scenarios, played simultaneously on giant screens and projected, like Renaissance frescoes, directly onto the walls of a darkened gallery. The viewer stands in the midst, as in a darkened church, and is made to feel part of a mysterious ritual. On one screen a trail of people are making their way through a sunlit woodland, perhaps mourners at a wake because the scene evokes a sense of wistfulness which is conveyed in the manner of their walking, in the endless repetitiveness of the trail, in the early morning summer light shining through the trees. ‘The constant flow of people suggests no apparent order or sequence,’ Viola writes. ‘As travellers on the road, they move in an intermediate space between two worlds.’ On another screen, a couple wait for an old man to die in his small house high above a seashore, rendered tranquil by the winter sun. After they have departed, the old man is left on his bed behind the locked door but is then seen in the next video projection standing on the shore below, where an old woman has been patiently watching as her furniture is piled on the beach to be loaded into a boat. The couple embrace, then they and their furniture are taken away, the boat eventually disappearing among some distant islands on a peaceful horizon. On another screen, people are carrying furniture down a steep internal staircase and through the front door of a formally constructed stone house. The light has an autumnal clarity. There are passers by, some mildly curious, some minding their own business, many carrying personal possessions. Subtly everyone’s movements speed up as if in anticipation of some kind of calamity. Some stop to help others but then they are running and tripping and catastrophe suddenly comes. A massive cataract of water plunges down from inside the house. It rushes down the stairs, it pours in torrents from the windows. It is at once exhilarating and terrifying. The remaining people and possessions are swept away. On another screen, people are trying to shelter at a kind of camp in torrential rain. A woman stands on the shore waiting for someone lost. There is an air of desperation, of hopeless disaster. On the fifth screen, a vague human form swims in fluid, fiery rays of light penetrating the water as the figure pulses and reaches.
The work seems to connect back to very primitive rituals and beliefs and the prevailing mood is of an inevitable resignation, with no resurrection. The scenario presents departure, disaster, chaos, bleakness and despair and it may well reflect our fears and foreboding for the future of the Earth in our own time, especially as the people displayed are clearly ordinary middle-class American citizens. Viola may well be a divine messenger of a very primitive kind, connecting intuitively with nature by effectively communicating danger through the rituals set up by art. It would be fanciful and romantic to think of him as a shaman but his work clearly contains profoundly primitive resonances, which are intuitively attuned to concerns about the world. Though artists like Viola may draw on mythical landscapes and rituals, their messages have an immediacy that strike us in intensity, demanding compassion and solidarity in the face of dread.