QUESTION:

What does the term 'afterlife' mean for you?

To my boys, this question is so far ahead it doesn't warrant head-space, let alone any meaning assigned to it.

I, too, remember the days when life mattered more than anything after it. I sought the meaning of life those days, not death.

These days, one funeral after another, other thoughts linger: "Where are they all going?"

As though they are going somewhere; the hole in the ground merely a gateway. A process. Like life is a process.

I've started to ask them. A parting question as I toss the proffered dirt down into another casket: "Where are you going?"

No one answers of course.

All my days, I had prescribed to the "Earth to earth and dust to dust" school of thought. We die, we resume our basic form: We feed the next life. We come from the soil and we return to the soil. It was happenstance turned us into a human; rather than clay in a potter's hands.

But then the space around me started to empty out. Like a football field, where one minute it is full, the next, gaps begin appearing- one here one there, as those wanting to beat the traffic depart... barely noticeable at first but then entire rows are missing and then, minute by minute, the whole stadium becomes empty. (This last part 'in my head', as I projected forward in time.)

I think, now, I know more people dead than I do alive.

So I ask each newly departed one: "Where the fuck are you going?"

Yesterday, it was a woman who'd once been a friend. I'd left her behind during one of my purges, and had not heard from or seen her since. It was a chance miss-sent text that'd had my head scrambling to associate the name with that of the young girl I knew once- then, the shock of her, too, gone... arriving.

There were about fifty or so people at her funeral. There should have been more!

The cemetery we were at- that's when I understood more lay below than stood above. (Far as those of my generation and the ones before mine went.)

After life.

We call what we do here, life. We assign it a verb: living. Alongside it, we assign the verb dying. We call the process death: The moment of our birth also triggering the moment of our dying.

But where to next?

That's the thing about living: You amass learning. And sometimes, this causes havoc in your brain because new evidence disputes long-held beliefs; else, challenges firm viewpoints. Simply, your "Earth to earth and dust to dust" no longer has a stronghold. "There has to be something beyond!" you are now convinced. "We just haven't found how to access it."

After death.

What does it mean for me?

The moment of dying also triggers the moment of birth.

I see no after life.

I don't know which particular lowered casket made me conscious of this new viewpoint: "They're all still here because they are matter and all matter is energy and energy doesn't die, it gets re-distributed." (I may be wrong.) But that view fits nicely with me. It best fits with everything I've lived and everything I've learned.

Maybe in another form; maybe in the same body re-living the former life; maybe in an alternate reality- their wherever and however and whoever now simply unreachable for me but... very much alive. Those remains in the ground mere skins shed- the energy driving them from birth till death still persisting in this world.

Redistributed. In this life and in forever others.

What does it mean for you?