Afterwards

What will happen to me after I die? No doubt, whatever it is, it will come as a surprise. 

The body. Well we all know what happens to that. It stops working. It dies. It rots. 

What about the mind? My experiences, knowledge, wisdom, the girls I slept with, my collection of Rugby Songs and that thing I do when I waggle my eyebrows. When I die, will I remember how it was on Earth during my corporeal existence? I may have been ripped off a few times, or lost some Loved Ones, or gotten old and creaky - but I travelled, saw many Wonders, met interesting people, read many books and listened to some great music. But now, dead, what happens to me?

It seems to me that there are several choices, none of them particularly enjoyable. 

The first one is that I shall go to Paradise. Meet God. Have a rather liverish chat with him (if He lets me get a word in edgeways). And then spend eternity with all the other souls who passed The Test. Hang around. For ever. For this though, I wouldn't need to have an ego. Dangling from the roof of an endless hall like a flickering light-bulb rejoicing in the Grace and Love of the Almighty would leave a lot of time for thinking about my Favourite Movies, or football, or eating a decent Sunday Lunch. Or maybe harping on to the light-bulbs around me about the godawful musac they play there. 

Maybe they'll let me knit socks.

My point: if the ego still remaines intact, then one wouldn't be at all happy in a Heaven like that.

It would be nice to go to a place where all my Loved Ones were waiting for me. I would be glad of that. As I mingle with those Who Had Gone Before, letting them catch up on who ended up with who and said what to whom, I imagine a wall of dust at the edge of the horizon and the sound of hooves and claws as a hundred, nay, a thousand creatures come galloping, flapping and hopping towards me: all the pets I've looked after during my years on Earth - all looking at me with that simple uncomplicated adoration that only animals can manage. 

And now I've gone and forgotten all of their names.  

Maybe Heaven is just like earth, a place where we are eternally young. A world without scorpions, lawyers or The Euro Weekly. We could run around drinking, smoking, drugging and fucking, all without hangovers or consequences - but I don't think God would approve. Let's leave it listed here as an agreeable 'maybe'.

Purgatory would be different. There would be no Point in me being punished - for ever - if I had forgotten what I had done, so the memories, the me-ness, the I, would remain.  Perhaps, as Dante suggests, there are lots of different Hells, and I would be sent to the most appropriate chosen one for me in my particular case; perhaps with visits on Thursdays to another chamber to catch up on my swearing. 

In all, I think, a Place to avoid.

It comes down to this: the body has gone, and the hope is that the mind goes as well. I certainly won't need my memories if I reincarnate. They would get in the way. Lying there as a baby in some cot in Pakistan, knowing that I have a thousand dollars stashed in PayPal and trying to remember the password. No, once again, the ego must be lost. A bugger perhaps, having learned most of Hamlet at great effort, but the future Adeeb would have no use for it as he grew up to a life of stitching tee-shirts for Amancio Ortega.

I suppose a reincarnation on the Planet Clunk would make a nice change, but again (again!), I would lose my memories of my Time on Earth, and, frankly, once the surprise of seeing my tentacles change from blue to pink each time I passed wind had worn off, I think that I would start to feel a little tired. 

What would be the point of it all, hey? 

Perhaps my Time here on Earth - I lived a full life unlike the wretched child who died stillborn, or the boy who was blown to bits by an American drone - is a sort of School for something more Grown-up. Paradise again? Mars?

I could become a ghost and catch up on my haunting. One has to wonder about ghosts though. There are either very few of them, or else there are lots of whisper-thin spirits floating vaguely around, watching me as I type this, but incapable of moving the pencil that sits beside my keyboard. If one is going to be a ghost, I reckon, one needs a sheet, a chain and a voice-box to go Whoo.  

The ego could go. That would mean the End of Me. I imagine myself as a composite of seven (why seven?) smaller, indestructible agents that come together at Birth and break up again at Death. It's a Buddhist proposal, that the ego must be lost. I am a Part of Something Larger, or maybe, parts of something smaller are joined to make me who and what I am; for a while, anyway.  Then they will go their separate ways, and join into other humans, or maybe, in a smaller number, into other creatures. 

I like the story of the brief question posed by Saint Peter as one arrives at the Pearly Gates. 'So, how did you enjoy Heaven?' he asks. 

'Mightily', I shall answer.