“What Is Death?” = “What Is Life?”

In a strange way, focusing on the question of what death is also focuses attention to the question of what life is. You can’t have one without the other.

It’s a question central to my novel, The Big If. My protagonist, Benjamin Fields, has conversations with what he considers to be an imaginary woman. However, as Chloe predicts his future on numerous occasions, Benjamin (cue the eerie music) wonders if this imaginary woman is more than total fiction:

Voices. So many voices inside. Which ones should I listen to? Voices from memories? The voice of reason? The Voice of America? The voice of inspiration? Chloe was an extraordinary entity babbling in my mind, but was her voice real? Was facing her voice facing reality or was it facing a growing, expanding psychosis borne of betrayal and too many nights spent alone in bed?

It all comes back to death, I told myself (and any spirit entity within listening range.) If we pass through life one time and fade to black at its conclusion, we’re off the hook. We can do anything we want. Life is an orgy of opportunity. We can gorge on sweet treats, feast on intoxicants, then fuck our remaining brains away in a fireworks spectacular. Nothing stops us from taking the curves at high speed. We can lie, cheat, steal, kill. We can fly hijacked airliners into tall buildings or torch innocent people in subways. We can strangle diversity and individuality with corporate branding and profiteering. We can steal our neighbor’s newspaper and applaud when our dogs poop on their lawns. We can beat each other unmercifully with knives or fists or gossip or competition. We can seduce other people’s spouses or drag folks into our shit piles to make us feel superior. If life is a free ride with no penalty box or no hope of survival or no stairway to heaven, what’s the point? What do you get for good behavior? Why not just claw and scrape our way through the garbage heap?

Here’s the guessing game part—what if we don’t fade to black? What if we dissolve from one reality to another? What if how we spend our lives in this physical world determines where we end up in the next world? I wish dead people sent postcards back. Having a wonderful time. Can’t wait to see you here. Why is the afterlife such a mighty question mark? What point is the Universe making by being so stingy with proof of the Big Picture? Just imagine if for one day all the living people on earth could see dead people walking. Gawking at us. Even ignoring us. If I saw all that ectoplasm, I’d change my ways. For one thing, I would quit jerking off. Not that I have anything against jerking off—as Woody Allen said, it’s sex with someone I love—but I wouldn’t do it for an audience. Not unless one or two of them stripped and joined me. But then it wouldn’t be solo. Then it would be consensual sensuality. Consensuality. Nor would I work the same job if I knew for sure that death wasn’t a ghastly slide to blackout. Then I morally couldn’t participate in my role to convince juries to award the big bucks in death cases. It’s just not as effective: “Well, Billy isn’t really dead. He’s basking in the light with all his angel friends.” Pain and suffering won’t pay as handsomely if the defense proves that a perceived tragedy is actually a karmic debt slapped on the barrelhead.

I get so excited thinking about the ramifications of the near-death experience and what it could mean to our world if we paid attention to the mounting anecdotal evidence of a whole lot of people saying that death is a fantasy.