MAYBE ,,, ?

12:35 am, then 1:22, now 1:49 am, instead of being sensible and letting the under-desk eliptical exercise my legs and feet for thirty minutes or an hour and sapping my energy so I can go back to bed for a long autumn's nap, I'm sitting here with the early mug of hot & black and three saltine squares, each with a smear of a soft cheese from Zingerman's Jewish deli in Ann Arbor and thinking to blog for a few minutes. 

Or not thinking. At ninety and not counting I need all the physical exercise I can muster.

This is a tart cheese, could be goat milk cheese but it's not.

We bought steak yesterday, and will cook it probably early afternoon; Kristen is coming over for Sunday dinner. Weeks ago we'd made the family commitment for Saturday and Sunday and we're keeping it, everything else will have to wait, is suspended, off the calendar. 

Steak, and Linda's made a salad. There'll be a couple kinds of mushrooms, collard greens, chocolate chess pie from Zingerman's. Growing up, I never heard chocolate chess pie, IDK, seems to me maybe buttermilk chess pie or lemon chess pie. But chocolate chess pie would have to be a Yankee innovation like other sorts of cultural tampering.

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"He'll miss out on everything that happens from now on" was said of Pacey yesterday when Kris was here, a thought I've had about my father now and then over the thirty-two years since he died, "What a beautiful day on St Andrews Bay and he's missing it." It's a condition of death, the dead miss out on everything that's going on, not only the storms and wars and sickness, worry and stress, but the birthdays and graduations and family get-togethers, Christmas from now on, and the family weddings and funerals, Thanksgiving Day, the feasting and maybe remembering Old Times. Thornton Wilder's classic "Our Town" is available free online for reading, in fact it's downloaded on my computer desktop and I return to it now and then. It's about death actually, life and death - - Mother Gibbs recognizing who is being brought up to the cemetery on the hill, "It's my daughter in law Emily Webb," she says, and Emily comes over and joins them. George comes back to the cemetery that evening and falls on Emily's fresh grave, inconsolable. "They don't understand, do they?" Emily observes. "No, they don't understand."

My week: the long expected death of a loved one's cat this past Thursday, the loved one's grief and trying out thoughts to help cope and maybe understand. But we living cannot understand and neither can those on the other side. In the play "Our Town" the folks at the cemetery understand a little better and are anticipating something eventually, in eternity not in Time, but they don't know what. In C S Lewis' little book "The Great Divorce" the dead in Hell are still and forever oblivious, but the dead in Heaven have a better understanding and assuredness: traveling in heaven a far, far distance, beyond the distant mountains they may eventually see God face to face, a hope and even a certainty.

So, watching inconsolable sadness and trying to Be There For has put my mind back into contemplating possibilities. And perhaps my POV, or maybe not:

MAYBE we sleep in Jesus, as St Paul says, until the trumpet sounds, all the dead are raised bodily and, together with all the living, meet the Lord in the clouds for judgment and sorting out into who makes it into the new Kingdom of God on Earth versus who is dismissed to exist no longer?

MAYBE our soul goes directly to Paradise as Luke seems to have Jesus promise to the repentant thief? Or maybe our soul is detoured into a purgatory for cleansing in order to better qualify for transit on into Paradise where all is perfect?

MAYBE we abide in Hades waiting for what, we never know?

MAYBE we abide in waiting for a Time or half a Time, then are reincarnated into a new Being, human, animal, or other? Maybe this happens repeatedly, maybe in each incarnation we have a sense of earlier lives, maybe not?

MAYBE in the process of dying, our soul is met, greeted, welcomed by the soul of someone we knew or who knew us in life? 

MAYBE, putting philosophy and religion about the soul aside, all life within us dies at death and we cease to exist, having had our one chance at life, and fade into oblivion, simply part of the Universe?

It has been said that this possibility of oblivion, our own nonexistence, is so inconceivable to us, so impossible for us to understand, that we grasp at other, religious, notions of some way, any way to save ourselves. 

At any event, no amount of belief, no matter how fervent or certain, makes anything True.

Now that we are here for a Time, we may forget that there was a Time before our conception, birth and life when we were not; and that we are simply passing through, and such Time without us will come again?

There is much to contemplate about the other side, eh?

Now 3:19 am.

RSF&PTL

T90 

   

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