Stardust

Where we go when we die.

© Mikhail Kalinin

My sister told me recently that she wants to be carried into her funeral to ‘Walk of Life’ by Dire Straits. I could picture it perfectly, in the style of the music video: the pallbearers dressed as American football players, running around with the coffin, three laps round the church, slaloming between the pews and the font, until the song ends.

I suspect a couple of extra bearers wouldn’t go amiss; a pine coffin is surprisingly heavy. Then again, the bloopers were what made that video so good in the first place.

Not that she has any plans, mind you. But doesn’t everyone sit down at some point and think about what music they’d want at their Final Farewell? You won’t be there yourself, but if you leave it to others you’ll end up with some tired or desperately mournful choices: a psalm you didn’t even know existed, Andrea Bocelli, or — God forbid — James Blunt’s ‘You’re Beautiful’.

And that’s how you’ll be remembered. That will be the mood people take home with them.
No thank you.

I’ve made that kind of list myself many times, only to promptly forget it and start all over again years later, with entirely different taste in music and an entirely different state of mind.

When you’re a teenager, the list is utterly melodramatic. Ten, twenty years on, it’s mostly angry and depressed. But in recent years I’ve been gravitating, much like my sister, towards something more festive. A little tongue-in-cheek; not too serious.

We’re all going to die, after all, and once you’re past the halfway point you’ve rather forfeited the right to complain. A child dying is a tragedy; a young adult is deeply unfair. But if you’ve had the chance to become, to be, and to do what you wanted... well, any time beyond that is bonus time.
— Time in which you get to become and be and do even more.

Onwards and upwards.

I thought I’d found the perfect song for my coffin’s send-off out of the church / crematorium / pub: a lovely upbeat song by Macy Gray, ‘The Letter.’ Sadly, when I looked up the full lyrics, it turned out to be a suicide note. That’s not really my style; I’m the sort who sits through the entire end credits at the cinema, just in case there’s a surprise at the end.

And yet:

“So long everybody, don’t be sad for me
Life was a heartache and now I am finally free
Don’t know where I’m headed, hope I see you someday soon
So long everybody, I have gone beyond the moon”

Isn’t that just beautiful? And it’s so groovy! The DIY aspect aside, I find I agree with every word. I think it’s staying on the list — and I hope people will leave the church dancing and singing along.

I won’t be watching, though. I won’t be there.

I think everyone goes where they believe they’re going: my parents believed in heaven, so that’s where they’ve found each other again. If you believe in reincarnation, you’ll come back as a blue tit. Perfectly fine by me. I wish everyone their seventy-two virgins or a one-way ticket to Valhalla — but I won’t be joining in.

I’m not going anywhere.

One final dream, one grand hallucination, and then it stops. My consciousness dissolves into the universe. No memories, no regrets, no longing. Simply nothing. Quiet. Stardust.

My body can go into the ground. That’s not scary; it will be consumed and dispersed over years, decades, millennia, into countless plants and creatures. Atoms are forever. An infinitesimally small part of me will return in your blue tit.

A while ago I watched a TV series, Midnight Mass, in which my own private thoughts about a possible afterlife were put into words — far more beautifully than I ever could:

Some people might say: “But that’s not fair! No heaven means no hell — so where do the bad people go? When do they get their punishment?”

Well, as far as I’m concerned, they’d better receive that punishment while they’re still alive, because afterwards — again, in my view — there’s nothing. No cosmic justice. Which is precisely why it’s better to try and make a more beautiful world here and now; there is no second chance.

It’s often said that you live on as long as other people remember you. I’ve always found that a lovely thought and it actually carries a kind of heaven-and-hell idea within it. The sweet version, naturally, is that people loved you, that they miss you, that they think back on you with warmth. That they learned something from you, that they found something you made beautiful, that they tell their children about something meaningful you achieved.

In that sense, Vermeer, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela are in heaven. And a certain carpenter from Galilee is still, even after two thousand years, remembered with affection and cited as an example worth following.

By contrast, Attila the Hun, Vlad the Impaler, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler are, all this time later, still remembered with fear and revulsion. Even if Trump and Putin manage to rewrite the history books, mass murder really does rather little for your reputation.

Even if those men almost certainly didn’t wake up each morning thinking, “What evil shall I do today?”, they will not be forgiven their ‘evil for a greater good.’ For all time, they will be known as monsters.
What a legacy.

Is that not hell?

Anyway, I don’t exactly live on that grand a scale — but, even if I won’t be aware of it myself, I’d love to be remembered with some fondness, even for a short while. If only because the funeral was such a blast.

That’s heaven enough for me.

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Sing along!

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