Afterlife

20 Jun 2025

I’ve experienced many deaths. Deaths of strangers, of friends, family. I’ve cried, grieved, and I thought I understood how I felt about death. That it generally made me a bit sad and I could move on quickly from it.

Then my mother died.

I’ve had to take a hard look toward what I actually believe the afterlife is. Before my mom, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what I believed. I didn’t think about it. I didn’t want to think about it. It’s a difficult question to answer because it’s the most important aspect of your worldview. It defines and derives everything you believe, and if you leave it as an unknown, a death like this kicks you out of yourself like a horse’s back hoof to the stomach.

At the very end my mother mostly slept, groaning, with some occasional words muttered that proved she was still here. I would grasp her hand and stroke her hair, and murmur what came to my mind. I told her to imagine the most beautiful garden. One with all colors of flowers in bloom, that never needed weeding, never any watering. She could sit and enjoy tea in the garden for the rest of her life. And unlike reality, the beach was a short walk from home. She could take a salt-sprayed stroll whenever she liked, and the brine would never reach the flowers. A paradise she earned.

It came to my lips because Afterlife is as natural to human minds as breathing.

I read What Dreams May Come at this time, and although the prose is horrendous the content feels real. Not everything as described. Not all of the literal details. (Like afterlife people coming up with all the media in the real world and we have it because afterlife people psychically transmit it to the living. ???) But the idea that Afterlife is what you make of it. At the end, you will judge yourself fairly and give yourself the Afterlife you know you deserve.

What is Afterlife to me then? Like everything else in my cosmology, it is Concept. It is as real as Justice, Fairness, Responsibility, Freedom. It does and does not exist. It is not materially real, but has material effects. We are connections between Concept and Material reality, and upon shedding our Material essence, we return to Concept.

My mother returned to Concept. She was a gardener, cook, mother, wife – and perhaps most importantly, a lover of all the small pleasures of life. Wherever she is, it is a distilled essence of what she was – She is a distilled essence of what she was.

I have a spot on my mantle with an urn containing her hair (I was not around to get her ashes – but brushing her hair gently and having the stiff strands fall out is more meaningful to me anyway), a tea candle with honeysuckle fragrance, a photo of her near the end and another with me as a small child, and the stuffed dog she made me. That last one is a major inspiration in my recent plush sewing hobby. It is wonderful to hold something that was made by her hands. I am a creation of her holding a creation of her. There’s a raw power in that connection commercial gifts can never match.

But those are all just Things that remind me of her. They are not her. They are material pointers to the Concept of her. That is what makes death so difficult, that the Thing can never exist again. Only pointers remain. Only references to memory. So long as I hold onto those pointers the Concepts of her exist in my mind. And so long as I and my children exist, the pointers to her Material essence exist. But never her. She is gone.

Gone to that beautiful Garden of Concept.