I am dying. No, this is not a cheap ploy to get your attention, it's the absolute truth! I am dying. That is a truism if there ever was one. We are all "born to die" as the saying goes (If there is no such saying that goes, well, I've just made it up!) because no one survives a life on planet Earth. I remember a popular slogan from the seventies: "Today is the first day of the rest of your life." I suppose that somehow that was meant to make people think about the rest of their life. And did they ever. They were entering a booming time of happy middleclassdom, the age of Yuppiedom, of fancy apartments, monster homes, cheap air travel, esoteric entertainment, drugs, fancy cars and an influx of (to be hated, feared and practically declared terrorists) immigrants to do dirty and menial service work at sub-standard wages and work conditions. Soon Wall Street and every other trading house in the world would be crawling with screaming carpet-baggers going from rags to riches practically overnight. Yes indeed, those people were thinking about the rest of their life. Or were they? Shouldn't thinking about the rest of one's life include a healthy relationship with Death?
The concept of "dying" fascinates me. I like the challenge of it, and the gothic kind of mystery attached to the process. One part of it is assured, so no need to focus on that. But what about that other part? That annoying aspect of death as an agent of transition, of change, or perhaps of termination? When I re-watch the movie, "Meet Joe Black" (starring Brad Pitt as Death) I find the concept of an incarnated Death quite appropriate. Someone as important to my life should make herself or himself known to me. But I would want much more than is alluded to in that movie. I would want some sneak previews, not necessarily of my own passage, but some general idea of what takes place, if anything does take place.
At this point I can hear those who ascribe to religious faith interjecting. Oh, but we know, by faith, that Jesus (God, Allah, take your pick) promises heaven to those who believe and live according to the will of God. Well, yes, I know that. I know that according to the book of Hebrews, "faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" or something like that depending on the book version. But is that in any way helpful, after making the truthful statement: I am dying? Again, it would be somewhat more helpful if the Bible writers had spent more time describing "heaven" in some way the average Joe could understand. It's all left to interpretation, and that has gone pretty far afield over the ages and the belief systems. Basically the faith person is like the hopeful who enters a terminal to fly to a destination. He may or may not have a ticket, and if he does, all it will say is, "out there." Where's the starship Enterprise when you need it?
So let's talk about dying. Don't like the subject? It's always relevant and pertinent. Like taxes. Years ago when I decided to force myself into an alternate way of living; when I chose to change the way I perceived myself in relation to everything else, I wrote this down: Of all the people, beings, entities, I have or will ever encounter, who is the most faithful? Whom can I trust to be always at my side every moment of this life? Death. Death is our one guaranteed faithful companion. Oh, he may seem preoccupied with other people or events, tending to the millions dying in cataclysms, wars, famines or genocides. Or he may be too busy taking care of the short-lived oppressed and down-trodden of Third World nations to pay much attention to me. But that, I realized, was faulty reasoning. Death can take care of all the dying, and there's never too many for her/him to handle! Once I became convinced of that, I made a promise to myself (that being the only legitimate person anyone can promise anything to) that once I reached to age of fifty (if I made it that long) I would be ready to die. Note: "I" would decide that readiness. That was a rather bold, and as it turned out, cocky kind of a promise. I reached that age long ago and in retrospect, I certainly was not ready to die at that point. Had I done so, my ticket would have been a return one, that's for sure!
Yes, I passed my deadline, and so I came up with an explanation to cover the ensuing years. I'm now living in sudden death overtime. I find that conducive to serenity of mind. In one sense I'm already dead and in another I have this living gift which I can use to give ever more meaning to my current life. In other words, I have nothing left to worry about because no matter what happens around me, or to me in the physical sense, that is only part of this overtime I'm experiencing. Whether these events affect my health or longevity, is totally, and I repeat, totally irrelevant. I never thought I would reach this place, this plateau. I didn't really believe it was possible to live as if one were dead or to engage death as just another stage in an ever-more fascinating series of events called life.
So, you may well ask now, is there an afterlife? Having ditched religious faith as a useful tool to penetrate that gothic veil of darkness surrounding death, I had to come up with another explanation. Here it goes, and remember, that's for me, not for anyone else unless that "other" also chooses to try this out.
Having a rudiment of imagination and having done more than a fair amount of reading right across the board from history to classics (whatever these are) to romances, action dramas, westerns, religious and New Age literature, archeological research and science/science fiction, I have cobbled up a very interesting scenario of my post-death future. And how do I relate to that scenario? Well, I believe it, I just don't believe in it! That's not a subtle difference when you consider the matter. My future is not a matter of faith, but is a mixture of what I have learned in this life, and what I would like to go on doing in the next... and the next.
So, you may ask again, somewhat frustrated, is there an afterlife or not? Absolutely yes! Of course not!
Here's the deal. I have created my own afterlife. No small feat. Now then, it can turn out to be a work of fiction, or it can prove to be a wonderful piece of perception. If there is no future beyond one's physical death, I have lost nothing. Take note of that. Nothing is "lost" in annihilation because there is no self-memory. It may or may not be all lost. What a 'thing' has learned may well return to a main mind at the center of the cosmos, or it may cease to be. Matters not. But what I focus on is the possibility of life after death, and what a possibility that becomes should it turn out that "Death" is not a black hole of nothingness but a doorway.
We do not decide the times we find ourselves in. All we must do is decide what to do with the time we are given. (J.R.R. Tolkien)
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