What do you do with your life when Plans A-F fail?
Why, you move on Plans G-H-O-S-T, of course…
“Maranasati,eh?” I thought to myself. “Now I can feel fancy af next time I decide to deeply contemplate my own death. Lat-lat-lah!”
Yes, it’s true. Over the last year or so, on multiple occasions, I have found myself reflecting on my own mortality and the possibility that I might have to deal with it much sooner than I had ever expected. Between being on the cusp of middle age, and you know, 2020 and all, there has been so many exciting exit options for me lately!
Enlarged organs the size of cantaloupes!1See: No Shit Sherlock, Act III. Losing too much weight before the Apocalypse!2See: Death By Hangnail/Pants Epidemic. Leading the Woefully Unarmed Resistance!3Well, I never got around to writing this blog post, but FWIW, it was going to be pithily entitled “This Is Not The Michael W. Smith Reference You’re Looking For.” The wit of that title would have epically gone over everyone’s heads, I’m guessing. The 21st Century Plague!4See: The rest of this blog post.
(On the bright side, I have yet to envision how the 2020 Election cycle will possibly take me out, but hey, the night is still young…)
Now, you might be tempted to brand such thought patterns as “creepy” or “morbid,” but thanks to my new friend Maranasati, I can legit argue that I am instead “enlightened” and/or “healthy-minded.”
And if you can’t tell, I just learned the term “Maranasati” in the last few days, and am indubitably5Yes, please watch this YouTube clips so you get the friggin’ cultural reference! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUUJSj3AzKo going to take the opportunity to drop it into casual conversation every chance I get. Fortuitously, though, it turns out that it is eerily relevant for the topic at hand.
I came across the concept of Maranasati–aka Zen Death Meditation–recently when reading up on my go-to stress reliever, Qi Gong. In short, it is the idea of taking all the crazy sh*t going on around you, and putting it in perspective by taking time to think about the nature of death–yours and of the ones you love (including–wait for it–your beloved pets). It’s a rather interesting idea, and you can read a much better exposition on it here.6Official reference: https://flowingzen.com/21294/zen-death-meditation-maranasati/
The point is, now I don’t have to feel so bad if I happen to get you thinking about your death after reading this After-Life themed post. Come, follow me down this path. If you dare…
This time, I knew it wasn’t just another false alarm. The symptoms were too real; too obvious. Sure, I could still smell, but I was pretty sure I had COVID. And, knowing my luck,7See Touched By An Angel and it’s companion article, My Time To Go. it was going to take me out just short of my 40th birthday.
I spent the 35 minute commute to my nearest available COVID testing site, thinking my deathly thoughts and listening to one of my guiltier pleasures in life, the Real Ghost Stories Online podcast. And the results were…not what I expected.
Oh–sorry, I didn’t mean the results of the COVID test. That? That actually came back negative (and I’ve never been so disappointed in my life!). What I was really referring to was the results of what happened when I followed the black rabbit down the rabbit hole.
Now, where to begin…
My COVID Commute didn’t start too well, seeing as how my very active imagination was running amok, and I found myself overwhelmed with the thought of possibly dying.
But I wasn’t particularly sad for myself, though. You see, one thing I’ve realized through all of my impromptu Maranasati sessions is that I’m not necessarily afraid of death. Instead, its the thought of leaving behind the ones I love to carry on without me–that’s what scares the ----- out of me.
My kids. My wife. My mom.
If I can’t take care of them, then I have failed at the one meaningful job I have had in this lifetime. Sure, I have a bit of life insurance that would help supplement the Boss Lady’s healthy salary. But other than that, I wouldn’t be leaving behind much in place to continue providing for them.
And so down that logical rabbit hole I went:
If I die, I can’t take care of my family.
If I can’t take care of my family, I have failed in life.
I don’t want to fail in life…oh, wait. I get it now…
I am most definitely not ready to die.
Well, poop. That doesn’t seem like a very Zen-like conclusion to me. I’m starting to suspect that I may not be Maranasati-ing it up right…
Meanwhile, my ghost stories podcast happened to be filling my precious little head with some interesting ideas. The particular episode that I happened to be enjoying throughout all of this was about a guy’s uncle who died unexpectedly in his thirties, but apparently liked to still hang out with the family and pull pranks on them. It killed me when I heard his favorite way to get their attention would be to make their smart phones play the last video of him playing with his band in concert. You can’t be ambiguous about who it is that’s doing the haunting, I guess. At least if you truly love those you’re haunting, right?
Now, the idea of something like this was not a new thought to me, and this episode just served to remind me of something that had already been mulling in the back of my mind for awhile.
Well, I don’t know how to put this delicately, but…I don’t know jack squat about what happens when one dies. Is it a binary divine decision between Heaven or Hell? Is it absolute nothingness? Is it the last thought one has before death that persists after that final breath?
I have believed various flavors of some of these theories throughout my life, sure, but I can’t say I have ever known the answer. In fact, a key foundation of my worldview is no matter how well I think I understand something, my understanding will be, at best, incomplete.8I believe I first discussed this (somewhat clumsily) in Surfboard Waxes Philosophical.
But here’s the deal: I have listened to a lot of people’s personal experiences,9Via 2 podcasts in particular: http://www.realghoststoriesonline.com/ and https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/spooked. and whether I like it or not, there’s vastly more anecdotal10While I stress that this is anecdotal evidence, if you collect enough data points, you start to get valid scientific-method-level evidence. evidence of a ghost realm than there is of a heaven. Not to exclude the whole concept of there being a heaven; what I’m really trying to say is that I’m starting to strongly suspect that there might be something in between–and it looks nothing really like your traditional imaginatings of “purgatory.”
Well, that’s an interesting thought.
Death may not be the end of my time on Earth...
I’ll leave you now to mull over these two main trains of thought (“I am most definitely not ready to die” and “death may not be the end of my time on Earth“). I’m curious where your mind might wander off to with those to ideas in hand. Think it over will you?
Come back next week, and we’ll compare notes. Trust me. It will be a lot more fun than you might expect.
I don’t want to get too cocky here, but I’m thinking I might just make you a fan of Zen Death Meditation yet…
Content created on: 6/7 November 2020 (Fri/Sat)
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