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We all die. I don’t know whether or not there is an afterlife, and neither does anyone else.

People have a range of beliefs. Some people believe in a heaven of fluffy clouds. Some people believe in a hell of unending torture. Some people believe in a gray space of limbo.

Some believe that one’s place in the afterlife can be purchased with money or obedience or membership or works or sacrifice or mantras.

Some believe that your spirit rejoins the energy of the cosmos, or that you will sing with the stars. Some believe that souls return to the timeless space of eternal Dreaming. Some believe the afterlife will be a difficult journey of some kind, or an entrance into an eternal perspective where all times and places exist together.

Some believe that death is a transition into another realm or dimension, or a pause before starting up another life here through reincarnation.

Some believe that in death, everyone wanders around in an underground cavern.

Some believe that necromancers (the more accurate translation of the biblical “witch”) communicate with the dead, so there must be a place where individual consciousness continues. Some believe that sacrifices or homage ought to be paid to ancestors because they get more energy and can continue their existence that way.

But nobody knows.

We can comfort ourselves with the notions that someone who has died is now with God, or in a better place, singing with the angels, carrying messages, dancing a skeleton dance with us, guarding us and looking down from the stars.

But nobody knows.

It is understandable that the thought of our ultimate non-being causes anxiety.

It is understandable that we want to feel more important when we contemplate the sublime majesty of the universe – and all its possible parallel universes.

It is understandable that comforting mythologies exist that attempt to mitigate the pain of loss and grief and injustice and feelings of powerlessness and meaninglessness that confront us.

Thomas Aquinas proclaimed that one of the sublime joys of heaven had to be witnessing the agonies of those who have hurt us.

When I am sad and anxious about death, I imagine an ideal afterlife. I’ve imagined it in great detail – my fantasy living space, with a community of loving friends and family who are now everything they were meant to be, and surrounded by wonderful smells and tastes (note that I’m not willing to give up a sensual existence of some kind). There is a part of me that persists in the hope that whatever is sufficiently envisioned may exist.

I pray, yes I do. I entreat benevolent entities at all levels of whatever hierarchical or distributed spiritual systems could possibly exist. Male and female and beyond gender. Sure. But I don’t know.

We are the only beings that we know of who live with the knowledge that someday we all – without exception – will die. Heidegger called it Being-towards-death. We can repress and cover-up this knowledge, but that is an inauthentic kind of living.

I taste eternity, but eternity – well, it isn’t human. It’s an everything-ness that overwhelms me, and while it may bring a kind of ecstasy that is beyond language or explanation, it doesn’t seem – to me – to promise an afterlife.

I have a very difficult time believing in consciousness without mind. Perhaps mind can somehow extract itself from the brain’s electro-magnetic impulses, like bees leaving a hive, and find some other form of containment. I don’t know (pause… and neither does anyone else, got it?).

For various reasons (and no reason), it’s a good time to note of some of the thoughts that have been helpful to me, and which have given me some alternatives to the pathological visions that I was imbued with when young.

Living, learning, and navigating around through the admittedly limited form of our existence has been deeply improved and enriched for me with the following attitudinal choices:

Focused Attention. Curiosity and Questioning. Appreciation and Gratitude. Compassion and Caring and Kindness.

They are momentary choices, of course, but the more often you can really pay attention and observe, allow yourself to be curious and to ask questions, feel appreciation and gratitude, and open yourself up to receiving and giving kindness and feeling compassion for self and others… well, the better life seems to be: more real, more textured, more meaningful, more everything.

Tomorrow we may die, but no-one and no-thing can ever take away that we have existed.

The universe is unimaginably large, but our bit of life and history has its place in the timeline and we all help to create and uphold the rich fabric of the cosmos. In our human niche, bound by space and time, we are ourselves – and we affect others and we are all affected by one another and we are all together (Koo koo ka-choo).

The fact that I once saw the sun shining over ochre cliffs is not erased because it was a momentary event. Although it has passed, it is not gone. Although I may misremember or reinterpret it, the very value of that experience is that it happened – on that day, with someone dear. The light was just so, I was in a particular emotional state, I paid attention to it, I was curious about ochre because of its beauty, I was grateful to be there in that moment, and I carry that moment with me. I even have a photograph, but it doesn’t capture the spirit of that moment. It is only a reminder. The aromas, the feeling of the wind, the high-altitude mood, all of it – it happened then, and then the moment was gone (ok, yeah, a little reference to “Dust in the Wind” but stay with me here).

The bits of our lives that we most value are transitory by their very nature.

Everything changes, and if it didn’t, we really would be in hell – and never out of it.

Without passing through (and within and as part of) our human streams of time and space, outside of the ever-moving lines and processes of chaos meeting order, we would have nothing, nothing at all.

While you move in time and space, while you can perceive and question and appreciate, be just as authentic and kind as you can.

Value that spark of eternity in all of us, and dwell there from time to time – alone or in communion – but know this: We exist on the borders, moving, changing, living and dying.

Our lives are so special because we each have our own ways of experiencing, our own limited perspectives, our unique – and yes, transitory – associations and configurations of memory and projection and imagination and meaning-making.

We are human. We have a niche in this cosmos, and it can be very very complex and rich.

Even in pain and suffering and injustice, there are moments of bliss and celebration and laughter and love. With the knowledge of death, and the fundamental ignorance about life after death, be grateful for your span of days.

Our limitations are precisely what enable us to experience and construct our context, our meanings, our lives and our loves.

In Memory of Little One: Little One 1989 – March 29, 2006. She lived to be 17.

My cat Little One was “named” during the time that I was working on my MA in Philosophical Theology and Ethics. It was important to me to affirm “just a little one,” especially as a counterweight to all the reading and talk about a big, universal, all-knowing one.

I took her to the vet because she appeared to have a hole in her lower jaw, in which cat food was stuck. I couldn’t clean it out well enough. I remembered having my wisdom teeth out, and so I was thinking that she had probably lost a couple of teeth or something like that, and needed it to be irrigated and sewn up, and to be given a round of antibiotics.

In the 24 hours or so before I got her there, she really went downhill. Although she ate and drank, she was listless and seemed very frail. The vet said that the problem was actually a cancer in her jawbone that had burst out. She was also severely dehydrated and had hyperthyroid and was probably in the process of kidney failure. She couldn’t get enough water or food. Even heroic measures wouldn’t have helped for very long, and she was most likely in pain.

I decided that it was time to let her go. I could have taken her home – she probably wouldn’t have lasted another 48 hours – but after the experience of having done that with Pookha, I decided it would be better for it to be a quick and painless death. She cuddled in my lap, wrapped up in a little blanket and purring, for about 20 minutes. I talked to her and soothed her and said goodbye… Her heart stopped before the injection was even finished.

Tip – After you’ve participated in ending your beloved pet’s life, it is advisable to sit in the car for a bit (and cry or whatever else you need to do) before you try to drive, no matter how much you want to get out of there and go home. I almost got into an accident trying to leave the parking lot.

I’ll miss Little One. She was a rescue cat, and she only trusted a couple of other people besides me. She and Pookha (d. 2003) were there for me when I was away from family, in a new place with no friends. They were my family all through graduate school, and were still with me when I married and had a child. They were my kitty soul sisters.

We do have one more cat, Zoom, who adopted us last summer. He is a total sweetheart, but both my girls are gone.

Now I’m the only female in the household.

Our son Ben got to say goodbye to Pookha, but not to Little One. John was unhappy that he didn’t get to say goodbye – but he understood. It will be more difficult to explain to Ben.

P.S. Yes, it was very hard to explain to Ben why he couldn’t say goodbye. We talked about how you make decisions when there are a lot of things you want to do and you can’t do them all. He says he’s going to miss Little One, and he hopes that she finds Pookha (and Grandpa!) in “that space where Heaven might be.”

I’m back. In case anyone might have noticed, this may have been the longest time I’ve gone without blogging in months.

We went to a family gathering in Florida in honor of my grandmother Evelyn’s 89th birthday. In addition to my little family, my mom and uncle, and my two brothers and their families were there.

I went into the situation with some good advice from a dear friend: Let adults be adults, no matter how strange it seems. A hard lesson for me, since I tend to try to fix things and mediate and all that kind of thing. Actually, it turned out that almost everyone was fine. One glaring exception seemed (very unfortunately) beyond any mediation or healing from me or anyone else. I hope whatever was going on resolves itself. Perhaps I’ll write about it some day, when I’ve gained some kind of understanding or perspective. It’s beyond me today.

One thing seems worth mentioning here. It has been some time since my father died, but there had been no chance since then for his three children to scatter his ashes. Not wanting to take anything away from my grandmother’s birthday, we (semi-secretly) went off by ourselves to do the deed at last.

We shared some memories and anecdotes, cried a little, and ended up in a big three-way hug that felt utterly comforting and good. We each tossed a handful of ashes, then my youngest brother threw the rest just as far as he could. The lighter ashes rose into the air like steam, bending light to suggest a rainbow. A wide swath of what looked like some kind of sage was covered in white, and some few bits of metal that remained from his implants clattered against the ground. It wasn’t an ideal place, but it was very peaceful and open and clean and in the midst of nature. He wouldn’t have preferred Florida – but it was better than behind his mother’s old house, and it was the best we could do. If there is an afterlife, I hope that he is pleased. It was just the sort of informal but heartfelt occasion that he had wanted.

On the way down, we got a chance to spend a night with my friend Sharon at her house in Jacksonville, and John was able to get at least a little time with his friend Bob. Sharon offered her vacation house on St. Simon’s Island as a stayover place for the trip home. We arrived there by midafternoon Sunday, had a good meal, and – utterly exhausted – fell into deep slumber by 9. The trip back was uneventful, and I am very very grateful to be home.