A
Directory to the Afterlife
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Passing the
gate look to your left and behold the bone-white cypress tree.
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Orphic
Funeral Tablet
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One of my earliest memories is when my mother took me
to the wake of one of her relatives. A distant relative,
I don’t even know the name of this uncle. He was
laying in state in the next room, but I did not get to see him. (My
first direct
encounter with a dead person was with a soldier who had shrunk by three
inches
because he had removed the insulating from an extension cord, spooled
the ends
of the copper wire around both his hands and then plugged in. 210
volts! I was
twelve and the first to find him. This here happened much earlier.) As
kids of
this age sometimes do, I must have been a bit too lively for the
occasion, so
somebody ordered me to tone it down - “they still can here us,” I was told.
I don’t know whether it is
just an urban legend, but the belief seems to be that the last sections
of the
brain to die are the ones connected with the hearing. Although
clinically dead
we still hear - at least for a while. Whether we are able to actually
process
what we are hearing, is a different matter altogether. Maybe we do. I
once met
a retired nurse - she still had seen WWI and a time without penicillin
- and
the old lady had no illusions about an afterlife.
For her it was just a state
of prolonged decrepitude like the Struldbrugs in Gulliver’s travel, and
why
should anybody want that. But then came the surprise. […]
©
- 9/9/2008 -
by michael sympson, 300 words
[to be
continued]
