Saturday, June 28, 2014

Death, life, before and after


I have been thinking about death a lot this week.  The reasons are obvious: a friend’s mother died suddenly and it is the second anniversary of the death of my friend, Martha.  Plus turning 64 years old a few weeks ago added to those “questioning moments” that we all get as we get older.  Is there life after death?  What is dying like?  Do our souls get a second (or third or fourth) chance?  Bottom line, what’s it all about?  What is the meaning of life and the meaning of death or is it a fool’s errand to try and put meaning on either one?

Growing up, we were indoctrinated into the “afterlife” theory, all good kids go to heaven if they have first, wisely, confessed all their sins.  With sin on your soul, you would have to spend time in purgatory where you would do small labor, like baling hay or washing clothes in a river, until you accumulated enough toiling hours to make up for all those sins. Then you could get into heaven. (Or, if you had connections still on earth, those connections could pray for you a lot and shorten your time even more.)   However, if it was a really bad sin, like murder or stealing someone’s wife or bike, then you would go straight to hell, do not pass purgatory, do not collect indulgences.  Obviously, the power of the confessional was huge: confess and be saved.  Don’t confess and possibly be damned.  You had to time it right, of course.  If you did the Really Bad Thing, then you better get yourself to confession ASAP or risk death and damnation because who knows when you might get hit by that bus.

But I digress….  What if there really is an “afterlife” but not in that “Catholic god and devil” way?  What if, when we die, our spirit/soul has a little resting time before either moving on or being retired? It would be like the Green Room that people hang out in before going on a TV show. There would be good snacks, wine, beer and water (no hard alcohol), unlimited streaming movies, nice comfy couches and reclining chairs.  Maybe George Carlin would be on hand to make you laugh and Julia Child would be happy to cook you up a little omelet. (Unless they had moved on to other bodies, of course.)  That wouldn’t be too bad.  When your spirit/soul had rested sufficiently and the next phase of your life was about to unfold, you would exit the Green Room and carry on with your new life, facing whatever destiny was in store for you.

What if you are a “bad soul?”  What if your spirit/soul is not destined to carry on?  Or maybe that’s when you definitely get transferred to a new life, in order to keep trying to get better.  And when you have finally reached the pinnacle of how good you will ever be, the apex of the perfect spirit/soul, do you get to retire? Does your spirit/soul enter some kind of “Soul Hall of Fame?” 

When I think of people I know who have died too quickly, Martha is the one who comes to mind.  Martha was a smart, funny, kind, wise, slightly flawed (of course) human and to think that her spirit/soul wasn’t put to use again is a sad thought.  Anyone would be blessed to have Martha’s cumulative experience guiding him or her through life, even if unaware of that experience.  I wonder, did she wait in the Green Room for a while and laugh at George Carlin’s humor and discuss the perfect grilled cheese sandwich with Julia Child?  Was she ready and willing to take on another corporeal body? I think the answer would be “yes.”  Martha, probably like so many souls, was no doubt eager to see what the next phase would be, what her new destiny entailed.

But maybe I am 100% wrong and when we die, that’s it. Nothing else. That would seem so short sighted, simply discarding spirits/souls that could be of great assistance to future human beings. But we will never know, will we?  And we will continue to ponder all this until we die and even then, who knows what we will be conscious of. 

More to follow, I am certainly not done with this subject.

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