Afterlife
by Scott Teel

I think about possible scenarios for myself after I eventually croak off and move into underground furniture. Without getting any particular religion involved, that is, that would muck everything up even worse in my head, kind of like it has mucked up the human race.

Some sort of paradise is probably the one everyone hopes for. I’m ambivalent about it. I’d like to go on forever if it was paradise, I guess, but everyone’s paradise would be different. Would it be a personal paradise for me that others could visit, or would it be one big garden that we all hang around in, and we automatically love hanging around in gardens once we die, like, it’s the best thing we could imagine ever. Would we look like people or just be globs of loving energy? Tough one. Of course, if there’s a paradise, there’s a flip side, probably, right? And would I be considered good enough to get in the paradise or would I end up in the Hell-place? Hell wouldn’t be all fire and flames, I think, it would be personalized for each post-lifer, your worst fear ever. Fire hurts, but being closed in a tiny space with a tarantula would be really, really horrible. Or getting a drill through the toenails, that would suck. There’d be worse, I’m sure.

Then there’s reincarnation, we come back as a new person, or even an animal. That would almost be as bad as hell, because I would not want to start over and put up with all this again. Except sex, that I could deal with, but growing up again? And what if I was born as a pygmy? I don’t want to walk through the jungle barefoot, I can barely stand the thought of stepping on a slug here, which I’ve done. No, this scenario is probably the least palatable to me. If I have to reach enlightenment to move on to nirvana, I’d damn well better do it in this life.

Maybe we end up just floating around on earth, watching things, maybe not knowing we’re dead, or as little globs of energy. I guess you’d call them ghosts. I never believed in ghosts except maybe as a child (change “maybe” to “definitely”), but a year or so ago I organized a ghost hunt in a supposedly haunted house, as a fun thing, expecting to find nothing, and hoping that one of the girls who came would get frightened and jump into my arms, and I was surprised to see little balls of light floating around all over the place, only visible to the night vision camera. You’d look at an area and they weren’t there but in the camera’s view screen and on the tape, there they are, flitting around. I can’t claim that they’re ghosts, but they were something I couldn’t explain. Chalk that one up to freaky on my list of experiences.

Maybe there’s nothing. That’s an option. When looking at things scientifically, looking at the facts that are known, it seems like there couldn’t be anything. That doesn’t particularly bother me. In fact, it would even be nice in a way to just disappear. No problems, no worries, no anything, it sounds so ultimately relaxing. Of course, I wouldn’t feel relaxed, I wouldn’t feel anything.

The majority of people don’t believe there’s nothing. Maybe they’re just fooling themselves and clinging to what they want to be true over what could be the actual truth. I think there’s also another reason so many people believe in an afterlife. Our memories.

With our history, and our knowledge of the past, we’ve learned what life was like over the millennia. We know what primitive people were like, and that there were Neanderthals and kind of know what they looked like. When someone read about Washington crossing the Delaware, they could imagine it, or see a painting that put the image in their minds.

In our era, and since photography and the movies were invented, we know the past better than anyone else in history (well…maybe high school students don’t…and George Bush..). Television and the movies have portrayed every era of history the earth has ever known, accurately or not. So we see these images of the Dark Ages, and of the dinosaurs, and it’s almost like a memory to us. It feels like we were there, sort of, seeing it happen. It feels like a memory, but it’s not – it’s imagination.

Still, as silly as it is, we kind of feel like we can “see” what these times were like, and “remember” them, and that’s what leads to a real misperception of life and the universe. Since we know the times and lives that happened before we existed, it’s almost inconceivable that we won’t continue to after we existed. We can see what happened before our birth, so we must be able to see what happens after our death.

As true as that feels, it is ridiculous. As I said, we’re not seeing or remembering these past times, we’re imagining them. I never saw a dinosaur, but I can recall what the earth was like sixty million years ago (“Those were the good ol’ days”). It’s almost like a trick we’re playing on ourselves without even realizing it, as imagination and memory sort of overlap and muddle.

That was a tough thought to explain, and probably I did a poor job of it, but let’s move on to something else I thought of today.

What if we’re born, we go through life making our choices and decisions, and when we die, we’re born again as the same person at the same time, with all the same options, and we can again choose what to do, each time perhaps choosing differently, resulting in different life stories. In this life, I’m a lazy clod who sits around thinking about the afterlife; in the next run through, maybe I get married at age 20 and have three kids by now. Another time I get run over by an ice cream truck at age seven (“He never could resist the toasted almond bar…”). Maybe I’m even someone who gets tons of dates and women love me. This would go on forever, with each of us having our own life over and over in our own little universes. Or maybe not. I’m just thinking out loud here, you know. That would also explain dejá vu…you feel like you’ve been in a certain place or situation before because you have been – in a previous life as yourself. The good thing about that would be that instead of getting pushed around and tortured by kids like Bobby Alcabes and Steve Seepersaud in elementary and junior high school, I could maybe decide to take a good swing and break one of their fucking noses.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m actually in a coma, and I’m living an imaginary life out in my head in the comatose state. Once in a while, it seems to me as if I hear my mother or father or someone say my name loudly in my ear, like it’s from another dimension. I’m pretty sure it’s just my brain replaying the voice of someone I know briefly, just to confuse the hell out of me. But what if that’s the real world actually getting through to me once in a while? My mom is yelling my name in my ear and occasionally I can hear it in this coma-world. I don’t know what this has to do with the afterlife, but somehow they came to be related in my head. I guess a coma is like being dead while you’re alive. Or something.

I’m always intrigued when I see a family that is devoutly holy, Christian, Jewish, or whatever, who claim to believe in heaven and God and all that stuff without doubt, and who, when someone close to them dies, weep uncontrollably and cry out in sorrow. If you believe that there’s a heaven, and you “know” that person has gone to heaven, and you’ll be reunited someday, but they’re in paradise now, why would you be sad? I’d think one would be like, “Cool, keep a soda cold for me, I’ll be there in a bit, you just have a good time while you wait for me.” There should be nothing to be sad about, if you really believe in heaven with no doubts, right? That’s why priests are always so calm at the funerals of people they know or who have died tragically – they really believe the person is in heaven, so there’s nothing to cry about. I’m probably asking for a smiting, though, for asking questions like that.

I did get smited once, but I don’t know why. I was nine or ten, and my mother was taking me and my little sister, Kim, to church. We were late, and mom was rushing us there, and on the way I was proposing that we sit in the front pew for a change. We always sat way in the back, but the action was so far away from back there. The front pew, everyone knew: that’s where it’s at.

“No,” Mom said. But I persisted, and in my persistent persisting, I caused my mother to miss a turn, making us even more late than we were. Finally, in the parking lot, she agreed, just to shut me up.

We entered the large church, a modern building that sort of resembled a giant Pizza Hut, which I called “Jesus Hut,” and started down the aisle toward the front. It was crowded, and the mass had already started. My mother had worn high heels, and as she dragged us up the aisle, they clicked loudly against the floor, drowning out the priest, CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK.

Finally, we reached the front pew and slid in. No one else was in the pew. We settled in for the ever-repeated rituals of sitting and standing and kneeling and speaking select phrases. Each pew had a seat in front of it except the front pew, or course. In place of a seat back was a wooden railing, about three-and-a-half feet high, with the bottom half of it simply open. This railing supported the kneeler and gave people a place to put their hands while praying, and the opening was for decorative purposes, I imagine. Trust me, this is important.

We’d already caused a scene when we entered, and things were finally settling down, when we were asked to kneel. So we all got down on our knees on the leather-padded kneeler and, though I’d done this dozens of times before, this time I landed on the kneeler too far forward, and slid right off, forwards, out through the opening under the railing, landing on the floor on my face in front of the priest with a deafening SMACK. This particular church had pews arranged to either side of the “stage” as well, like a sort of holy arena, so a lot of people from the side pews saw me come through and splat down like a big, injured frog.

It was very quiet. The priest had stopped talking to stare at me with the rest of the congregants who could see me. Blushing, I sheepishly climbed back into the pew and got on the kneeler. The priest resumed his reading.

A few seconds later, I heard my sister, three years younger than me, start giggling. A little giggle at first, but it started to bloom into a full-out fit. Now that she was giggling, I started to giggle, too. My mother glared at us, but it was too much for her, and within seconds she had joined in, shushing us as she giggled along. It was a freight train and there was no stopping it. Soon, we were laughing and snorting over the priest’s reading, and the more we tried to stop, the worse it got. Our laughter echoed up around the high roof of the Jesus Hut.

After a few minutes of inability to get us under control, my mother stood up and grabbed us by the hands. “Come on,” she giggled, and we walked back up the aisle and out, snorting and holding in guffaws, her heels going CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK, with the entire congregation staring at us in disbelief. Who were these people? We rarely attended church after that, becoming “C and E Christians,” which meant we attended church on Christmas and Easter only. And we always sat in the back.

I should’ve told the priest, while I was lying in front of him, that Jesus pushed me. Oh well.

I was only smited, but a friend of mine actually had a brush with the afterlife. She had her heart stop one time at her class reunion, and said she felt as if she was in a little room, watching everyone through a window, from a distance, getting further away, and she thought, “Gee, I never got to say goodbye.” Then she was back in her body as they revived her. That implies that the afterlife is a little room with a window, like a peep show.

Many people who have died and been revived report a bright light that they feel compelled to move towards, kind of like moths do. So maybe in the next life, we all come back as moths, flapping toward a light. There’s no heaven, it’s just a big 40-watt Sylvania bulb that we clamor around. Why else do moths and bugs feel so compelled to flock towards lighting, anyway? How could it be a natural instinct? What did they do before we invented lights? Flock toward the moon? It’s weird.

I guess it doesn’t matter what happens after we die, there’s nothing we can do to change it anyway. I don’t believe or not believe one way or another right now, the whole thing is too much for my mind to comprehend, I think. Who is God? Is he the God of the jolly fat Buddha who sits under a tree getting enlightened? Was he crucified? Is he a Hindu cow? Is he a quiet God who lets us do our thing, or is he a vengeful God who smites those who displease him? Maybe he’s all these things: a jolly fat, crucified cow who sits under a tree, occasionally quietly smiting people, like 10-year-olds who want to sit in the front pew at church.

Or maybe not. Paradise or peep show? We call it “the other side” right now. But, like it or not, one day we’ll all be calling it “home.

© 2005 Scott Teel