After "Life" comes "Death".
And so it is in this succession of blogposts.
I remember lying in bed one night when I was seven or eight years old. Suddenly, I was overtaken by a very disturbing thought. What would my life be like if my mother and father died? They seemed so everlasting but I realised that their deaths were eminently possible. They could disappear. And then where would I be? There were tears on my pillow that night. After that I never quite looked at my parents in the same certain way as I had before.
What is Death? Through the centuries, we have had to listen to the spouted beliefs of religious people. We have heard about Heaven and angels, Paradise and everlasting life. Those wicked young men who hijacked the four planes on September 11th 2001 were emboldened by the belief that they were securing their places in their imagined Islamic heaven. And nuns in convents surely believe that through their self-denial and Christian devotion they will secure their places in heaven.
Those of us who are atheists, agnostics or non-believers have tended to keep our thoughts about Death under wraps - perhaps reluctant to cause offence. But tonight I will share with you my thoughts about Death and sod the believers of whatever faith they happen to cling to.
When life has gone from a human being, there is absolutely nothing else. No Heaven. No Paradise. No after-life. The person in question has gone and all that is left is lifelessness, emptiness, darkness. It's like a theatrical performance has ended and the curtain has come down. There's nothing more.
In this regard we are just like roadkill. Does a squashed rabbit go to Rabbit Heaven and what about a badger, a skunk, an armadillo, a pheasant, a fox, a pet cat? I am afraid the truth is they are going nowhere. They are dead, dead, dead and there's nothing else beyond for them.
You might ask how I know for sure that my notion of Death is the right one. Well all I can say is that it is the most logical. The ending that makes most sense. I have felt it deep in my bones since I was a boy. A feeling that has been consolidated by seeing close up the corpses of my father Philip and my brothers Paul and Simon. Their bodies were obviously just vessels. Life had left them and they were gone.
In my view, it would be arrogant, presumptuous and fantastical to imagine for one brief moment that there could be anything beyond these lives that we are currently living. Heaven is a ridiculous notion. The only Heaven we can ever know is the one that we make here in the land of the living - finding happiness with our families and friends and in the things we do.
Living honestly, without the remotest possibility of an after-life means you are obliged to make the most of the here and now because there's nothing else just round the corner. I live with this certainty and I am not afraid to die - to enter that eternal nothingness where we all must go but I am very grateful for the life I have - a random human egg and a random sperm meeting in January 1953. That's me.
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/aVL5SQo