Boredom from lockdown, fear of CoVid-19, and work-from-home anxieties can be a somber combination that can make even the best of us reflect on death, how we’d like to go, what’s beyond our earthly lives, and what we’d like to do there, if we’d ever have the choice.
We don’t, obviously. But I thought it would surely be nice to be able to make these following choices.
Have a new form of existence.
Science tells us that death brings about the end of consciousness and self-awareness, but I prefer to believe what most organized religions claim—that there is life after death. And while we’re in the realm of selective belief, I’m thinking there’s neither hell nor purgatory-- only heaven, and that’s where we’re all going.
Die a painless death.
Perhaps the best, most seamless way to transition to the next life is through sleep. I go to bed at night in my mortal form and wake up the next day in the afterlife. No pain, no suffering, no resistance.
Have a reunion with departed loved ones.
We’ve all heard stories of people on their death beds getting picked up and escorted by their dead relatives or friends into that great white light. I believe this would mean a lot to me, imagining myself in my final moments, anxious and terrified of what awaits me in the great beyond. If my departed mother or father comes to me and takes my hand, it would greatly assuage my fears.
Then maybe that would just be the start of spending eternity with my departed loved ones, having good times with them like we did as mortals but hopefully without the disagreements, misunderstandings, and quarrels that had marred our worldly relationships.
Review my earthly life.
I would be so happy to discover in the afterlife that there’s a record of my whole life, archived and ready for me to playback and re-experience anytime I want. And by playback, I don’t mean like playing a DVD. I mean like being there all over again, like virtual reality but will all the senses engaged. Obviously, it would be nice to relive the good times, but with the gift of perspective, I’m sure even the bad times would be worth revisiting and reflecting upon.
Visit the material world.
Not in a naughty, scare-people-stiff or pervy, camp-out-in-bathrooms kind of way (okay, maybe just for a day), but more of visiting the house where I used to live, the school I used to go to, or maybe even the office I used to work in. Even now when I’m still alive, I enjoy marveling at either how things have changed so much or how they’ve stayed the same after so long. I imagine enjoying it even more so in the afterlife.
Maybe it would even be worthwhile to visit some tourist spots I missed out on in life, or some I enjoyed so much the first time around, I want to come back to, ethereally.
Literally an eternity of travel and fun.
Meet deceased celebrities.
How awesome it would be to be able to meet John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, or Kurt Cobain, not just to talk, but maybe even to jam on some tunes. Can you imagine picking the brains of Albert Einstein, Sir Isaac Newton, or Nikola Tesla? I’d also love to share some laughs with Richard Pryor, John Belushi, and Charlie Chaplin.
Look after my living loved ones.
It would come naturally to all of us to want to look after, or maybe in this case, look over our loved ones after we cross over. We would all be guardian angels, not because we want to be, but because we’d be doing what guardian angels do. No one knows how much we can affect the lives of our living loved ones from the great beyond, but judging how our departed loved ones now seem to steer clear of our lives, maybe not much.
But who knows?
Photo by Nafis Abman from Pexels