Monday, April 20, 2009

Death

A cousin of mine said “when I die, I want you to donate my organs to those who need it, scatter the ashes of my brain on the soil so that knowledge can be given to earth”…I had an outer body experience recently. It was a conversation with my mother, she looked beautiful and had aged gracefully, her hair was well maintained and even in death, the diva still had an excellent fashion sense. Many of you might not know this, but after my mother died in that plane crash, her body was never recovered… (at least so we were told).
This and my cousin’s statement made me wonder….whatever happens to us when we die? I have seen some fucked up deaths and trust me, at the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter whether you die in your sleep, saying fuck the world, through brutal murder, suicide, drug overdose, slipped and fell, heart attack, asthma attack, anemia, motorcycle related injury, while snorting six pills of vicodin, riding your bicycle and minding your business, on Ibadan express way, armed robbers, hired killers, AIDS, Gonorrhea, Syphilis, were break dancing and broke your neck or maybe it was just your time to peace out…the truth is that we all die. So, where do we go when we die?
Yeah Yeah…all the religulous people will say things like “we go to the bossom of the Lord”..bla fuckin bla!!! I cannot argue where we go, because it baffles me how we know that after death, there is a “place” we go, a place assigned to us by the “decision maker” based on our actions while we were here…however, it would have been a lot easier and more convincing if we actually had references…u know, people who have been there, and their “Testimonies”…it would have been nice for example, to hear Fela say “hell na fire…ayakata”…because he has been there; or to hear 2pac’s account of the “ghetto in heaven.”
Sad that as a people, we create this illusion of someone being in a “better place” because it affords us the convenience to think of our loved ones being comfortable after they say goodbye. When we die, are our souls recycled into this new being in a new region with new experiences? Do we get re-born and live an unfamiliar life all over? Are we sentenced into this unending moment of silence and darkness? Do we just hover around our familiar and favorite sites and play pranks on the idiots that still struggle on earth or do we just seize to exist? I for one, have not had a lot of experiences (dreams, illusions, reality, film trick or hallucination) with the dead. My mother has not “appeared” to me and frightened me in my sleep nor has she “killed” those who want to harm me. However, the very few encounters that I did have with her were as close to reality as possible and I couldn’t imagine someone of so much soul and passion doing anything else with her after life.
On occasions, people have told me stories of their encounters with someone they swore was Teejay, however, the logical and realistic side of me refuses to believe it until I experience it with my own two eyes…yet they say, we were all created in twos. When I say death is an emotion, I mean it. No emotion is permanent…we are either happy, sad, angry, shocked etc. No one has experienced one single emotion for a long period of time…except death. Even if we are “recycled” and our souls are pumped into this new being ready for new experiences and seeming occasions of dejavus, we never return in our original form, hence those people who we left behind, still mourn us..NOW, if only there was a list of recycled souls so that our loved ones would hunt us down and reacquaint themselves with the new us…wouldn’t that be weird?! So where do you think we go? What do u think happens to us after death or rather…after life? Do we roam the gray area? Does the nature of our death affect our souls and their ability to proceed? Or is there this field dumpster where our curious, wondering and innovative beings are allowed to rut? Trust me, if I knew the answer, I wouldn’t ask you.