There is no time to prepare, there is no time. Somehow, Death comes in a way to suggest it is assisting you to escape from something more dreadful than itself. Makes you wonder what is more dreadful than being wedged underneath six feet of dirt, stone cold with your own thoughts as the only company – or your ashy particles scattered into the sea, each minute particle just as lonely as the next. Even those in death row are not given the time to keep everything in order.
Unfortunately, life and death are both lucky dips – “Come baby, come!” and “Gone baby, gone!” are never fitted well enough into the script to make them quote worthy. The odds are always changing. A carefully planned birth, a mother’s son blessed with a rich father is judged by the unwashed masses for having dirty underwear or holes in his socks (at the same time looking through his pockets) right after his beamer skids off the hilly hairpin bend into the rocky valley below. A nasty brutish life below the poverty line is somehow recognized by all the trappings a government funded, press attended funeral and is one of the subjects of an investigative documentary destined for prime time news slots right after that life is extinguished by an oil pipeline accident – the source of upped ratings like Wacko Jacko or George Saitoti. No, nobody wants anything like that.
At least some of the small small things should get organized then if we can’t sort the big stuff like redemption or forgiveness. Yes, yes, yes…We’d prefer it’s the torso not the head that gets mashed to a pulp – some of us are just too beautiful to miss out on an open casket ceremony. We want some time to at least get that porno disc out of the DVD player before bashing our heads against our own bathtubs etc etc. Yes, everybody wants something like that.
Even for those of us who chose to make a carefully planned exit, the small stuff still proves sweaty. Jumping off the top of your apartment building could as wel
l be setting someone else up for manslaughter. Jihadist martyrs may at certain points ponder the utility of the 72 virgins right at that last millisecond when their genitals are being pulverized by explosives, for we do not know what form the soul takes or if it indeed resembles the body, what liberties are permitted with our souls or with other souls for that matter. How will the mating of such pure beings be like? Right at that very moment before someone presses the button that will ignite the C4 wedged all around his balls as he screams his chosen battle cry, does he stop to even think, “Oh hey, do we still get functioning dicks when it’s done?” does he?
Still on the subject of dicks,
what the hell happened to Napoleon Bonaparte’s penis? Would he have opted to blow himself to bits like the fundamentalist jihadist if he knew the shriveled remains of his dick would be paraded around secret auctions around the world? Is he rolling in his grave and lamenting how his penis should have been preserved fully erect and in its full glory (despite its alleged small size)? Indeed, the process of dying is still complicated in itself too. Everyone, every living thing is converted to a unique kind of martyr, each advancing causes and courses of the lives left behind in big or small but mutable ways.
A bunch of oblivious Rhesus monkeys became the pioneers of space travel and had a rare view of the planet earth without their knowledge, never mind that the term “monkey” still being used as with a racist connotation implying all that is dark, inferior, unintelligent and devoid of civilization.
If the wonders of the deep ocean bed are still new to us, who will be able to see a pinprick of light after death engulfs them in a blanket of blackness so thick they can feel it? If life before and during death is so shrouded in mystery, how dreadful is the depth of the mysteries of life after death? Maybe Paradise is life stuck in a beautiful moment so brief if you blink you may miss it. Maybe it is infinite time stuck within the same beautiful space forever. All this, we shall know soon, or not so soon…
