Waiting for God

I guess this is a function of turning 88 last December.  And what is the “This”? Well, “This” is noticing that folks are dying all around you.  Now, maybe I just wasn’t paying attention. I mean, folks die every day, and famous folks seem to appear in my social media outlets with some frequency. Seems at least a few times every week, I note a posting in some newsie outlet that someone has just died.  Mostly, they are folks in their 70’s or 80’s. , but some times they are just in their 50s. Sad, very sad.  Well, it’s sad whenever someone dies, but to die in your 50s or 60s seems truly sad. The husband of a friend who is one of our favorite Farmers’ Market folks just died and we think he was in his 60s. The truly sad part of that passing is that when folks arrive in their mid-60s, they begin to imagine life without a daily truck’n off to work. Yeah, Retirement.  And assuming you have been reasonably careful, you can even imagine retiring with enough money on which to live.  So, dying right at that stage just seems like you were cheated by Life.  Takes the smile right off your face.

And then, of course, because we are old, many of our friends are old also.  So, seeing as how we are now in our 80’s, so are our friends.  And that’s really when folks begin to leave.

But then we have this term we always use—“Leave”. Sometimes we say that folks have “passed on”, or they have “departed”.  And then many folks engage in the fantasy whereby they envision the departed as sitting up above us, on a cloud somewhere watching us.

In short, they imagine that Life continues, but in a different form.  They can observe us, but they are no longer able to interact with us. But does everyone believe that Life After Tale?  Well, No. I, for one, have a different view of what happens “After”.  And what is that view?

Well, I imagine that we suddenly lose awareness and we do not even realize we are dead, because we no longer realize anything.  That is, our mind stops functioning altogether. It isn’t that it stops being capable of yelling at other people. No, it stops being capable of seeing/knowing/sensing. It goes blank, AND, it remains blank.  Further, it (the mind) does not suddenly allow us to see other dead folks, or to watch our trials and tribulations down here on Earth. Nope. We no longer sense anything.

Now, I suppose that scenario is both a plus and a minus. The plus side is that, we are not going to Hell, because there is no Hell. But on the minus side, we are not going to Heaven for the same reason. There is no Heaven.  And that’s the part that keeps my attention. I can’t decide whether that’s a good thing, or a bad thing.  We will simply shut down . . . Forever. We will never become born again. We will never be aware again. But then we won’t even know we are “not aware”.  To be honest, I have never really understood that Hindu reincarnation thing about being “born again”.  If you have no memory of your prior life, you also have no awareness. How is that different from what I imagine?

I realize that our population of “Believers”—generally churchgoers of any persuasion—will take serious exception to what I think and believe. And surely they are entitled to that viewpoint, since, to be fair, I have no more actual data than they do. Again, to my knowledge, no one has come back from Death.  Now, some folks get brought back to Life after they have technically died, i.e., their heart stopped beating and they seemed technically dead. Then through CPR or some other shock, they regain Life. I think that doesn’t count for much, since most have no cloud-like memories. They stop breathing, everything goes blank, then they return to breathing and Life again.  But none, to my limited knowledge, have anything to contribute to the debate about what happens after we croak.

And so, when I am told of a friend who “passes on”, or I read something, I feel a bit of a sadness, or even a shock. And it adds to my own awareness of the nearness of that event to me.  But I still do not know what to do with those feelings. I can prepare for the folks who I will leave behind, e.g., that Will thing. And I can even write notes (no this is not such a note) But I can’t do much else.

What I can do, more importantly, is to try to spread some more love and some more good feelings. I can try to make people around me happy.  Smile Richard. Make believe you’re on TV. Quit Hating things and people, even Trump MAGAHeads. They’re idiots, yes. But they don’t even know they’re idiots, and that is important to them.

So, maybe I should apologize for writing my tale here.  

And, when it’s time, Have another glass of some nice wine, look at your Love One and Say, To Us.