What happens to you when you die

Having a mother who is 95 and a half and while still relatively cognizant (and isn't cognition ALWAYS relative?) the subject of the end of life sort of comes up now and then.  We all know she is nearing the end of her life.  Well, maybe. Who knows, she has a pacemaker and she could go on for years.  But it would be better if she faded away quickly instead of disappeared by inches. The last time I visited Mom we sort of talked about what one thinks one gets once one dies.  Heaven? Hell?  A party with balloons and clowns and cake?  Punishment for past discretions?

My friend Tom thinks that whatever you want the afterlife to be is the afterlife you will get.  The devil? You got it.  Dancing bears?  You got it. Another life?  You got it.

Which brings me to this poem by Billy Collins.  Basically it is about just that: what you believe the afterlife will be, it will be that.  Here it is:

THE AFTERLIFE  by Billy Collins

While you are preparing for sleep, brushing your teeth,
or riffling through a magazine in bed,
the dead of the day are setting out on their journey.

They're moving off in all imaginable directions,
each according to his own private belief,
and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal:
that everyone is right, as it turns out.
You go to the place you always thought you would go,
the place you kept lit in an alcove in your head.

Some are being shot into a funnel of flashing colors
into a zone of light, white as a January sun.
Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits with a golden ladder on one side,
a coal chute on the other.

Some have already joined the celestial choir
and are singing as if they have been doing this forever,
while the less inventive find themselves stuck
in a big air conditioned room full of food and chorus girls.

Some are approaching the apartment of the female God,
a woman in her forties with short wiry hair
and glasses hanging from her neck by a string.
With one eye she regards the dead through a hole in her door.

There are those who are squeezing into the bodies
of animals--eagles and leopards--and one trying on
the skin of a monkey like a tight suit,
ready to begin another life in a more simple key,

while others float off into some benign vagueness,
little units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere.

There are even a few classicists being led to an underworld
by a mythological creature with a beard and hooves.
He will bring them to the mouth of the furious cave
guarded over by Edith Hamilton and her three-headed dog.

The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins
wishing they could return so they could learn Italian
or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain.
They wish they could wake in the morning like you
and stand at a window examining the winter trees,
every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.

I love this poem.  I printed it out and mailed it to Mom, but I am not sure she will get it.  I hope she does, though. 
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