Spelunking on Mortality, Hoping on Heaven.

Just flipped back and read my last journal entry. All those memories. All that time passed.

Now here I am again, awake at 3 in the morning, sitting with my mortality and a cup of hot cocoa. We all take turns at the wall; we all have dark nights of the soul.

Soon, too soon, all my atoms will be recycled into cosmic potting soil and that’ll be the end of me.

Or, soon, still too soon, my soul, my essence, my Me, will continue on to the grand, mysterious Whatever Comes Next.

Is there a heaven? What form will it take? Is reincarnation the way it works? If so, I’ll be like Albert Brooks in Defending Your Life, trying to prove myself fearless enough to continue onward rather than being shipped back to remedial earth.

Or will heaven be scriptural, and if so, which scriptures apply? Will heaven be purely metaphysical, consciousness without form, and if so, what the heck does that even mean?

Or will heaven simply be another place? Just as we go from the womb to the world, will we go from the world to some wider place?

I could keep spelunking on mortality until these typewriter keys are hammered flat. Instead, I’ve decided to do something immortal here and now: I’m going to tell my life story for my son.

Not the whole story. I’ll try to leave out the boring parts. I just want to leave enough information for my son to know me and remember me after I’ve traveled on. I want to leave him a typewritten time machine through which he can meet his father as a child, as a teen, as a young man.

I can secure that small immortality for him and for myself, here and now.

​As for the Big Forever, I’ll just have to wait and see.

Comments

Media Jean: Have you seen Defending Your Life? It’s hilarious!

Chip: I like “The Pavilion of Past Lives.”

Media Jean: You know, your dad overlooked one kind of possible heaven: man-made heaven!

Chip: You mean bioengineering?

Media Jean: Bioengineering, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, cloning, resetting biological clocks. There’s a lot happening on the frontiers of mortality.

Chip: I don’t think any of that will be ready in time for my dad.

Media Jean: Actually, it probably won’t be ready in time for us, either.

Chip: Yeah. If it was ready, right now, would you use it?

Media Jean: Heck yeah! Wouldn’t you?

Chip: Definitely! But I don’t think my dad would. He’d probably say it was unnatural.

Media Jean: You know, technology usually leaps ahead faster than we think.

Chip: Yeah! Maybe a longevity treatment will be ready in time for my dad!

Media Jean: Exactly! We just need to make sure he lives long enough to take advantage of it.

Chip: How are we going to do that?

Media Jean: First, he goes on a low calorie diet! I read that reducing your caloric intake by 30% can increase your lifespan by 30%.

Chip: Really?

Media Jean: In lab rats, anyway. But I’m betting the science holds up for humans.

Chip: I don’t know. My dad loves food.

Media Jean: He’ll need to start exercising, too.

Chip: He hates exercise, unless you mean hiking?

Media Jean: Hiking, jogging, walking, aerobics, pilates, weight lifting—all of it. He needs to hit the gym!

Chip: He doesn’t belong to a gym.

Media Jean: We’ll sign him up online. We have to extend your dad’s lifespan a little until science can extend it a lot.

Chip: You’re right! I’ll go through our kitchen and toss all the high fat stuff.

Media Jean: Great! I’ll come over and help. I bet we can boost your dad’s lifespan to 100, maybe 110!

Chip: Which should give technology enough time to develop a more permanent solution!

Media Jean: Right! Immortality, here we come!

​​Comic strip from the series "Johnny Green's Avatar"
(Kid, Inc. Volume 2: The Batcave of Childhood)

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