Afterlife Now

It is as though I finally understand what religion is to us. The savior from our fear of no afterlife. I have long tussled with the worries that end in a spiritless world. When will I see my sweet love again? How will my children get by? What will come of all that I have built, experienced and felt? I again find myself chilled by the desolation of nothingness.

When the talk of nuclear war graced my adolescent ears, I would awake from dreams terrified. Dreams where all that was left from the explosions were floating bodies and debris in the starkness of space. I contemplated, while miles away at college or on the other side of the world, how I would return to my mother and my brother, my grandmother and girlfriend if something cataclysmic were to happen.

I remember a dream in my early twenties that began with familiar friends in a familiar house near my old high school. My lover was with me enjoying the day as well. When I heard helicopters hovering overhead, I knew immediately they were going to fire on us. I remember diving atop her, flailing to cover every exposed piece of flesh that I could. When the missile hit, I felt the burning sensation slither up my back. I knew that I had saved her, but understood that we were still in trouble. I grabbed her hand and pulled her out through the back door. We ran hand-in-hand down the steep, grassy slope toward more open field. We were being fired upon still. We both instinctually know that we would have to let go hands and spread our paths if we were going to survive. We never broke stride or eye contact as we peacefully released one another and began our descent toward freedom.

I understand that after death we slump over motionless, a bag of carbon and fluid that will soon begin deteriorating and disappearing. I believe this because I am realistic and honest with myself about the disillusionment of assuming otherwise. Only the foolish, I stated with a firm tone, would waste life preparing to look foolish in death as well.

Today is different, however. Today I am lonely. Today I am emotionally and physically flogged from a short adulthood hollowed by narcissism. Today I am not worried with looking foolish to anyone at anytime. Today, I feel religious.

Religion is not the uniting of all who love each other, love God and love love. Religion is the uniting of all who are afraid to die without first knowing where they are going, and secondly, whether they are going to be accepted there. They will stand outside of the velvet ropes like a coed excited to enter the best dance club in town, knowing the bouncer will surely see the hopeful gleam in her eye and buckle beneath her batting lashes. We want eternity in a comfort we feel as though we rightfully deserve. We want our own self-created heaven. Though it would be tremendously exciting, I’ll never be convinced that its possible or even necessary.

It’s the not the deteriorating that saddens me. It’s the disappearing. With billions who have passed and billions more to go, we will merely vanish into the forgotten. A rotted box or discarded ashes left to the void. It’s being forgotten, like a month old pop song or completed book. We are dated and no longer relevant. Our hands never touching one another. Our lips never holding each others. We melt away and can not stay just a little longer, like trying to hang up the phone with your high school sweetheart on the other end. You hang up. No you. I can’t. I don’t ever want to let you go.

Maybe it’s more than that. Maybe I want to keep loving. It seems to be the only reason I am still alive today. I never want to live the day I can’t call my mother, stop in to visit and talk with her about anything. Show her that her years of struggle were not in vain, that I am a good man. I want see my brother and my niece at the park forever, and never experience the feeling of not being able to push her tiny back as she swings back and forth, or listening to my brothers newest adventure. I want to still lay my lover’s head on the pillow and kiss her to sleep until we are five hundred years old. I just don’t want to say... goodbye.

My self-created heaven is life just as it is now, where everyone is just a call or a drive away. I’m certain I’ll never take full advantage of it. Again, I’m realistic. But maybe if I just try to enjoy it enough, never miss a moment to love, and never hang up when I can still talk, maybe I’ll finally be okay with disappearing. A moment now is worth a million in death.