The reality of death first dawned on me a decade ago when my uncle died. I cried. My mum fainted. I wondered how so soon life ends. One moment he was turning the house upside-down. The next moment, he was lying calmly, dead.
It became a norm as I have witnessed more numbers of death than I do my birthday. But, if we aren’t bothered about how they died, shouldn’t we, at least, wondered where they went? Isn’t afterlife another life?
The grasses and they die. We trample on them on our way to farm. I attended a school where it was compulsory we work on the field twice a week, and even every morning. The blunt end of cutlasses grazed hungrily on the field. We buried the grasses under the soles of our cheap rubber sandals. They die, but nobody thinks, where do they go?
And The trees, the ones that bear fruit and the ones that do not. I remember, my father and I cleared many off our farms. The ones that stood beside the tiny path to my small farm greeted me every morning with a smile. And until the season in which they dried off, they blossomed, they lived, ever green.
So, if you want to know where the dead go, think about the time when coldness, darkness, and stillness is most intense, and think about the grasses and the trees.
And The plants, you know, asides the seed of a plant dies and is buried, another plant will never grow. Another?
Maybe the plant that died is the one that lives. The seed of a plant dies in a world, lives under the soil which is another world, dies in-there, and produces a plant, and the plant produces seeds. So, the seed lives on, in yet another world. And, the cycle continues. Aren’t humans like that?
Think about the time when coldness, darkness, and stillness is most intense, and think about the grasses and the trees and the plants.
And The animals. Fishes live in water. Birds fly, they sing. Some animals burrow, they eat, they drink, they live and reproduce and in the end, they die. Some are buried, some aren’t. Either ways, nobody cares about where they go. Don’t they go and live on? A question many would never ask. But, you, think and wonder.
So, if you want to know where the dead go, think about the time when coldness, darkness, and stillness is most intense, and think about the grasses and the trees and the plants and The animals. Maybe you can get the answer to the question you never asked.
Like a plant, we sprouted out from the valley in-between our mothers’ thighs. Where did we come from? Did we come from non-existence or we died from the world we were? Was that our real life, and this present world the afterlife, or maybe there isn’t an afterlife?
A friend that slept once asked a night before he left, “Where do atheist go when they die?” Instead, I will ask, where do people go when they die?
Maybe, death itself does not really exist. Maybe, the afterlife is actually the real life.
Just a random thought.
THE ANONYMOUS.