Where You Go When You Die

I’m not really sure about any of this but I think maybe after you die if anything happens it goes something like this: You find yourself standing in a universe of light. God walks up and shows a scene with a lot white-robed people on clouds, playing harps. Maybe you see your mother and your spouse are there, and you can be reunited with them, and wait for your children to come along.

But what if you don’t want that? Like maybe you had too many obligations in life, and you just want a vacation. The minute you walk through the gate all your relatives are going to be grabbing at you; everybody wants a piece of you just when you thought you’d gotten away from all that. Or maybe you never had children and/or weren’t such a good person. You might not want to see your relatives and they might not want to see your sorry face either. Or maybe the whole scene just looks boring. What exactly do you plan to do up there? How will you fill the time? So you ask God if there’s some other place you can go instead.

So God shows you another scene, where people are running around fighting and screaming, chasing each other around with blowtorches and so forth, everybody both an inflictor and victim of misery and suffering. If you’re a bad person, this might look like fun. All your friends will be there; most of your enemies too, and you can settle any unsettled scores with them.

Maybe you were never the inflictor, only the victim, not of other people but of God himself. If you’ve lived a life of pain, illness, and tragedy, or are close to such a person, then any option free of suffering might look good to you, but you’d have to wonder why God did that to you in the first place.

The whole idea, the way the afterlife is set up, is that you get to choose; God's not going to send you anywhere you don't want to go. The only caveat is that once you’ve made your choice you can’t change it. But there’s a whole spectrum of different places to choose from, and probably you have the additional choice of simply ceasing to exist. Suppose that, even though God might be Love, in life you’ve found that love, for all the good it may or may not be, does carry a lot of baggage when it moves in on you, and you’ve decided you want to travel light for a change, leave people alone and have them leave you alone. What’s wrong with that? You can go to hell for all anybody cares, and that’s the beauty of it: Nobody cares; you’re free.

Probably something moderately hellish is the place for me. I’d do a little sightseeing, then look around for a quiet place, maybe a crevice in the rock, crawl in and try to get some sleep. If somebody starts stabbing at me with a pitchfork or something,  I won’t feel obligated to put up with it and be polite about it.  I’ll stab him back, give as good as I get, make that guy wish he’d never screwed with me.

One request I’d ask God is if I could have a cat. I’ll bet there are plenty of cats in hell, so having one of my own shouldn't be a problem. Who knows, I may even see Princess and Scuffy again, but they probably won’t remember me, and I might not even recognize them anyway. The only thing I know for sure is they’re not in heaven.

It might be that life without death has no meaning, and that any conceivable afterlife gets boring after a while. The whole thing is probably beyond mortal conception anyway, so I don’t know if there’s even any use in talking about it.

I’d have to have made more of my life on earth before I could start expecting anything more. I can’t imagine a better place or time than right here and now, and that’s enough for me.