Death, Dying and the Whole Afterwards

I think my only excuse is that I’ve been having an odd couple of weeks with odd things going on. Here is my comment to Ken’s post Remembering Liam .

Liam sounds like someone worth remembering and great to have known.

We had a family funeral this week and my Mother seems never to be far from the topic of death, dying and afterwards. This month I decided I do not believe in god. So that’s given her something new to talk about. But she’s not a firm church-goer. Just from the generation where that’s what you do and how you think. Last night Stephen Hawkings was on TV, a new show on Discover called Curiousity. It was about god and did god create the universe. Hawking, as you might guess, says no about the god issue.

It’s interesting how things all come together at the same time, isn’t it? I haven’t though about god, death, dying, and afterwards for a long time other than an interest in old and neglected graveyards/ cemeteries. But here and now it seems the issue is all over my world. Even in your Irish rover of a blog.

Your tribute to Liam was lovely to read, especially the golf part where you painted him as human after all. When I die… I will leave no one behind (no children, just a brother and sisters and maybe my Mother if I beat her to it). At the funeral this past week I listened to my cousin’s daughter talk about her. It was lovely, sentimental and a good tribute to a Mother lost. My Mother likes what I wrote as a speech about my Father when he died a few years ago. I didn’t even like him as a person.

What will anyone say about me. No one here really knows me. They think they do. I think, in the end, I’d like nothing. I’d like to be in a building that blows up or lost in a shipwreck. No body. Then, maybe, I won’t give in to the temptation to see what thy say about me. Maybe if you’ve been blown up you can’t ghost around afterwards. That’s my little misguided theory. Anyway, once you decide you don’t believe in god, it’s interesting to see what you do have left to believe in about the whole afterwards.

I still believe in reincarnation but now you have to wonder who’s behind it all, who guides the process along and makes the decisions. This is a windy and twisted comment. Should keep you busy a minute and a half, if nothing else.

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