Ashes to ashes: Where do we go from here?
Let’s consider the world without us when we’ve gone, passed and moved on. Or, not to gild the lily, when we’re dead as stones and pushing up daisies.
Why is it so hard to talk about death when none of us leaves alive?
Oh, I know, many put faith in a corporeal heaven, personally tailored, perhaps a divine golf course, where nary a bogie bites a being.
And those disinclined toward a personal afterlife might believe in a cosmic joining of souls in a Ground of All Being.
I don’t believe in the first, don’t know about the second, and don’t much care either way, as the one thing I’m dead (pun intended) sure of is that hell, and therefore judgment, doesn’t exist.
Except when we create it right here, right now, in the only place and life that matters, on this small planet that we sometimes delight in, but often abuse.
And with that in mind I have to consider karma, as I find its sense of fairness appealing. No statute of limitations need apply. I like the idea that those who raise hell are condemned to return to it. Come back until you get it right.
So I like karma as an abstract idea. It’s one of the few afterlives that actually makes sense to me when pondering the universe as a whole, somehow equipped with a sense of justice, perhaps even humor.
How else to think of Darth “We have to work the dark side” Cheney next time ’round, if not as a cockroach (sorry, roaches), for his evil deeds in the here and now?
But I don’t believe in it, either.
I did pretty much grow up with the first heaven, where I’d get to do it my way even after I’d gone, but it didn’t stick for long. Forget about it, and not because I don’t golf. It’s just the one that most sounds like hell to me.
Why in God’s name, so to speak, would I want to live eternity as me? What kind of dismal fate would that be, condemned to be this self – with all its warts, flaws and limitations – forever?
Even scrubbed clean, made the best me I can be, the idea just sounds awful. Please, if that’s your idea of heaven, include me out.
I was once hopeful for the universe at least, in a kind of karmic sense, when the closed model theory of cosmology held sway: a grand eternity, each fresh universe expanding in the glory of a new bang, then gradually collapsing, only to repeat the cycle, worlds without end, amen.
I like that a lot, but as it now appears that the flat or open model of the universe is going to prevail, I’ve had to give up on cosmological karma. And as for other universes, who knows what holds sway, what laws bind them, what their fates might be?
In fact, “Who knows?” works quite well for me in considering my fate after death. As I like to say, I’m a liberal, so I’m comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty.
But I do know some things. My loved ones will have my body burned or I’ll have a “green funeral,” where my nutrients will gradually decompose to help nourish the sapling of my choice, as its roots reach my remains.
And the stuff of which I’m made will indeed remain, in the physical joining of my atoms with bacteria, beetles, my birch, and eventually the universe. This is the only afterlife that I know is real.
Good old Ludwig Wittgenstein, as imperfect a philosopher as I’ve read, nonetheless puts my perspective, well, perfectly: “Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”
You can take all this for what it’s worth, but I’d like you to consider another perspective and another look at the world when we’re gone, by an extremely good journalist. Pick up “The World Without Us” by Alan Weismann, my book of the year for 2007, now out in paperback.
What if we disappear from this earth? How long will it take to heal the wounds we leave?
Weismann looks in all directions – past, present, future – to examine our footprints on this earth. What of us stays? What goes? When, or if, will the world recover?
Plastics – not diamonds, as it turns out – are forever.