Or else, there can be a revival. The expanding Universe can recontract, the unwinding rewind, the dying undie. That sounds good and hopeful but what the revival ends in is as surely, if much more gloriously, the death of all ("Stars, Won't You Hide Me?" by Ben Bova).
The Last Trump
by Isaac Asimov
The' Archangel Gabriel was quite casual about the whole thing. Idly, he let the tip of one wing graze the planet Mars, which, being of mere matter, was unaffected by the contact.
He said, "It's a settled matter, Etheriel. There's nothing to be done about it now. The Day of Resurrection is due."
Etheriel, a very junior seraph who had been created not quite a thousand years earlier as men counted time, quivered so that distinct vortices appeared in the continuum. Ever since his creation, he had been in immediate charge of Earth and environs. As a job, it was a sinecure, a cubbyhole, a dead end, but through the centuries he had come to take a perverse pride in the world.
"But you'll be disrupting my world without notice."
"Not at all. Not at all. Certain passages occur in the Book of Daniel and in the Apocalypse of St. John which are clear enough."
"They are? Having been copied from scribe to scribe? I wonder if two words in a row are left unchanged,"
"There are hints in the Rig-Veda, in the Confucian Analects-"
"Which are the property of isolated cultural groups which exist as a thin aristocracy-"
"The Gilgamesh Chronicle speaks out plainly."
"Much of the Gilgamesh Chronicle was destroyed with the library of Ashurbanipal sixteen hundred years, Earth-style, before my creation."
"There are certain features of the Great Pyramid and a pattern in the inlaid jewels of the Taj Mahal-"
"Which are so subtle that no man has ever rightly interpreted them."