Of Death and what comes after

Sometimes when I'm just sitting and doing nothing in particular with my free time(or when I'm studying organic chemistry) my thoughts wander incomprehensibly to death.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not an edgy teenager who likes to sit in the dark(well actually I sit in the dark but that's more or less because I'm too lazy to switch on the lights) and writes "thoughtful posts" with quotes borrowed from the internet. Rather this line of thinking just hits me out of the blue sometimes and the strange thing is, its been happening for a while now.

I distinctly remember, one night when I was nine and I had gone out with my father and we were returning home after doing some errands, when this thought struck me and as a child I knew no greater source of knowledge other than my father and mother. I asked him, "Dad, when we die, what happens?"(in Malayalam, but that's essentially what I asked him).

I'm grinning even now, thinking what would have passed through his mind when he saw his nine year old son ask him one of mankind's most terrifying and mysterious questions. Yet as my father was wont to do, because he was and still is a great father he drew upon what he was taught in his life and what he wanted his sons to achieve and told me, smiling, "You'll go to heaven". My nine-year-old self satisfied with this response went along with his life and yet this thought struck me several times later on.

The concept of Heaven and Hell is a simple concept found in many beliefs(most popularly Christianity). Heaven is a wonderful, joyous place where those who did good deeds in their lifetime and stayed true to God go to. Hell is a fiery and miserable place where the sinners go after their death to suffer in eternal damnation.

Of course, not every religion follows this model, there are many religions with their infinitely varying intricacies which make them extremely different, yet similar in a sense. If I were to explore these intricacies and minutiae we'd be here all day so let me point out one different idea of afterlife: Buddhism.

Now it must be noted that contrary to popular belief Buddhism is not a conventional religion: It is in fact an atheistic religion, it has no God. Rather it follows two main principles to my understanding: Karma and Enlightenment. Buddha pointed out that life is full of misery and the inevitable pain of death, there is no everlasting joy just as there is no everlasting sorrow, there is just the cycle of life and death. To transcend death, the Buddha reasons we must attain enlightenment. Enlightenment is said to be a transcendent state devoid of joy, sorrow or desire. 

It is reminiscent of a line from Rudyard Kipling's famous poem: If

                           If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

                          And treat those two impostors just the same

 The "If" here alludes to a condition which when fulfilled leads to success and a sense of fulfillment.

   That explains your time on earth but what of what's after life?

    

 Karma is a familiar word in today's popular culture, its essentially a quantity measuring the good or evil you do during your lifetime. Depending on your karma you will be reincarnated into a human or a heavenly form (good karma) or a lower form like an animal or an ant or even to the hellworld (bad karma).

 When I sit back in my chair and I think about death however none of this passes me by, perhaps the thought of heaven and hell because I've been taught that since I was able to grasp what they meant. I instead feel a strange sense of emptiness, what would I do after my death?

I just think of an endless abyss with no sensation, which doesn't really scare me but I suppose

such an existence just seems to confuse me. However, am I scared of death? Not death 

inherently but to die at too early a time and not have experienced as much there is to experience? I fear that.

Life is full of entropy- uncertainty, the only constant or the only thing you can be absolutely sure of is that what lives, must one day die. 

I feel like death is antagonized too much nowadays. You have to understand that death provides the impetus for life. If death never existed, the concept of life wouldn't exist. Death gives life its value, death encourages us to go beyond our limits and experience that which we usually wouldn't experience. We must reconcile with death, not fear it because in fear of  death we lose precious life. True life exists when you accept death and dare to live knowing you'll die one day.

This is a very dense matter to reconcile with and even understand but we must try our best to do so.

In these moments of emptiness I remember about the time my mother told me about my grandfather from whom I got my name, Abraham(he was also my godfather). He believed in the theory of Buspurkana or Purgatory, where we wait for the second coming of Christ. I've heard of purgatory a lot of times and I knew the concept before my mother told me stories of my grandfather but for some strange reason I'm fascinated time and time again when she tells me about him.

My mother often tells me that I remind her of him, he was a simple man and he loved his wife and children dearly, all the more because he had to go to away from Home often for his work. He read a lot and despite never making much of a fuss about it, was an intelligent man. 

When I was born his motor functions were already slowing down and he barely spoke so my interactions with him were few and since I was too small to understand how valuable this time was I found him uninteresting.

Nowadays however he passes through my mind fairly often, perhaps its because I see my mother whose face glows with admiration when she talks about him and perhaps that's what I seek in life, to live like my grandfather did, a simple life with not many frills but still accepting death knowing that I have people who love me like my mother loved her father.