There are all sorts of hypotheses about what happens to us after we die.
Some believe that, like Clarence in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” we become befuddled angels on a quest to attain our wings. Others believe that we drift into a netherworld of ectoplasm and eerie music accessible only to spiritualists with crystal balls. Others still believe that after we draw our last breaths, we take what my friend in the Marines calls “a dirt nap.”
They are all, of course, wrong.
What really happens after we die is that we become floating particles … dust motes. We find a sunbeam that suits our fancy, hop on, and loll around in the general area of where we once lived. We don’t actually do anything once we get there; we are more like smoke hovering over a long dead campfire.
Your Uncle Harold who died at 97 after playing a game of checkers at the Carl Shultz Park … your Aunt Martha who died (or was it a homicide?) at a nursing home in Winnipeg after she bit a nurse … your cousin Marco, hit by a bolt of lightning on a golf course in Miami … your brother Max, gored to death while running with the bulls (what a stupid thing to do!) in Pamplona.
Once they were people, with eyes and smiles and fingers and toes. Now they are beautiful microscopic particles dancing in the light that streams through the window. Dust motes are what they have become. That’s all. Just dust.
They cannot answer our prayers. They cannot help us to write a resume, unzip a stuck zipper, prune a hedge, trap a skunk, or housebreak a wolverine.
We are down here. They are up there. Lounging around all day with nothing to but float. Which brings us to the worst thing about being an infinitesimal particle in the sun: The tedium. They are (or were) bored. Bored. Bored. Bored. No windows to wash. No cross puzzles to do. No lawns to mow. No graduations to attend.
Then, literally overnight, all of that changed when … jolted out of their stupor by thousands, millions, billions of electronic messages whizzing past their head (do dust motes even have heads?) … the dear departed unexpectedly found themselves smack dab in the middle of cyberspace.
Just like the rest of us.
Yep. It’s true. The souls of those we loved, loathed, and disregarded were suddenly reawakened by the Internet. And … and … and … here’s the clincher:
