Approaching the End of Life by Donna Schaper

Author:Donna Schaper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Back to the Afterlife

Spiritual preparation for death is to ask for a blessing from the one who is dying. When the practical preparations are well done, the road is cleared for many blessings. Otherwise we distract ourselves from our feelings and our red sea crossings.

A man told me how numb he was about his father’s death. “I just don’t feel anything.” His father had been very critical and very judgmental. He is the one who responded to his son’s pleadings about how he was feeling, saying, “How do you turn this thing off?” The son thought he was referring to the monitor and its beeping. He was really talking about his son. He had frequently made fun of his son in public for talking too much. Even at his ninetieth birthday, as the son gave a eulogizing speech, the father said, “Get on with it.” He wasn’t joking either. What the son wants from the father is a blessing. He wants his father to say to him, “Go to heaven,” not “Go to hell.”

“Go to hell” is one of the better curses. You say it on the way out after a fight. You mean a big good-bye, not a little one. Once you have told someone to go to hell, it’s pretty hard to get reacquainted. First of all, they never know when you’re going to say it again. Plus you have given them eternal, not temporary, advice. Hell is a good curse word because it has a certain finality to it.

It is also a good curse because you can blame your use of it on theological misunderstanding. After all, no one knows where hell is. Or if hell is. Or whether you can get frequent flyer points on your way there. Or if it is cold like the cosmopolitan nothingness of superior existentialists or hot like the great fire of the brimstone bunch. Nor does anyone know if you are conscious of being in hell or whether your consciousness—so heavenly—is lost on the way down. Why send someone somewhere, even in a curse, if they won’t know that they are there? What if they don’t really suffer in hell when what you wanted is for them to suffer? Without consciousness, you can’t really enter the Olympics of suffering because you can’t find an audience for it. Is there Facebook in hell? How do we alert our friends “back home” about our whereabouts? Do they care? And do we care, once we are in hell, whether they know or not?

If someone gets upset that you cursed them with one of the better curses, you can just say you didn’t know what you were saying, which of course is true. Even though we can’t know, we have to wonder, along with some of the greatest literature and cartoons of all time. Red-tailed devils, pitchforks, and Crime and Punishment all come to mind.

I wonder who else is there? Hitler? My ex-husband? His lover? Nixon? My PhD advisor? Atheists only or agnostics also?

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