A Sign from Above

I was ten and had been an alter boy for two years. Only young boys, whom the Church hoped to recruit for the priesthood could serve at the altar. An alter boy helped the priest with Mass rituals, swinging incense canisters, ringing the altar bell, speaking Latin prayer responses.
Rookie altar boys were given the least prestigious masses to serve, the six o’clock weekday morning mass.

My mother, a devout Catholic, attended daily mass and High Mass on Sundays. She beamed with pride before my first solo at High Mass. Ten o’clock High Mass was the most prestigious gig for an altar boy and future priest.

“Fara benissimo,” she said in Italian. “You'll do fine.”

I had served hundreds of masses but was still afraid of making a mistake. Father Billerio, a kind, tolerant priest, comforted me. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll do great.”

I didn’t. I dropped the Missal carrying it from the Epistle side of the altar to the Gospel side.

During Communion, my duty was to hold a paten under the parishioners’ chins to prevent flakes from falling to the floor. As the priest reached beyond me to give the communion host to a woman who had squeezed in at the extreme end of the rail. I was pushed into a bank of candles.

Feeling warmth, I looked back to see my vestment on fire. My mother screamed. “Mio ragazzo sta bruciando!” “My son is burning!”

Father Billerio set the chalice on the altar rail and beat the flames out with his hand, then resumed distribution of the communion hosts, as though nothing had happened.

I wasn’t hurt but took this as a sign from above, that perhaps I didn’t belong on the altar, either as an altar boy or a priest.

The assignment for my Creative Writing Class was to write about our conception of an Afterlife. This was my submission:

In the recurring dream, Simon and his father stroll arm in arm, talking about life and love and politics and death, anything that comes to mind. Simon awakens most days, alert and refreshed, happy that his father still occupies these dreams. Today, however, he emerges from sleep confused and disoriented, unsure where he is.

A white ceiling and white walls magnify the enormity of the space that surrounds him. Simon searches in vain for windows or lights to explain the brightness that assails his eyes. The smooth reflective floor is like one massive marble slab.

Simon listens but hears nothing. The quiet is deafening. He’s never before experienced such dead calm. He imagines this is what a vacuum must be like, for not only does he hear nothing, he smells nothing, not even his body odor. He licks his hand but tastes nothing. He pinches his cheek and feels nothing. His bare feet should be transmitting cold from the glasslike expanse of floor. How, he wonders, can he have lost all his senses?

Is he dead? Is this what passing means. Though he’s always been spiritual, Simon’s never conceptualized a personal notion of an afterlife, a heaven or hell. Sure, he’s aware of various depictions or images conveyed by paintings, books and movies. But nothing he remembers is as stark as this.

The chamber that envelops him seems to extend in all directions to infinity. Yesterday, or whenever or wherever yesterday was, color and vibrancy filled his life, as at twilight, his favorite time, when the day ebbs and the evening begins, when feathered clouds of pink and orange mark the subtle blending of day and night. Simon closes his eyes to block the sterile whiteness, to see, he hopes, more of what he remembers––to see color, to see shapes, to see people.

Then, as if on cue, people too numerous to count materialize. They stream in from the walls and ceiling. Suspended, like particles of dust in the air, they float around Simon, and as they do, Simon notices that each one is in a state of flux, in continuous transformation. Faces become older, then younger; bodies fatter, then thinner, then fat again. Hair thickens, thins or vanishes, and changes color from black or brown to gray, and back again. Adults become infants who evolve into toddlers and teens, then adults. Others seem to be flailing, as though they’re in pain, arms and legs thrashing, heads jerking.

Some, though, change not at all, while others dematerialize, involuting into tiny stars, like asterisks, that vanish at the speed of light, leaving in their wake asymptotic, rainbow-hued contrails.

As he watches this continuous morphing, Simon notices he too is morphing, changing into familiar versions of his past self. His transformation, more rapid, and more frequent than those around him, frightens him.
Why is this happening? If this is a nightmare, when will he awaken? Or is this the other side he and his father had discussed? His father believed that after death, one’s spirit or soul travels to the other side in a state of ethereal postponement, like purgatory, but without notions of purification.

“Simon,” he’d said, “I believe as long as someone still living remembers you, your spirit remains alive in an ether. You become an Etherian, and because each living person remembers you differently, each time a memory occurs, you, as an Etherian, change a little, or a lot.”
To Simon, most Etherians appear to be in a peaceful state of serenity, and are therefore likely remembered with love and affection. And those who are flailing, did they do harm, cause suffering, were they immoral, are they now remembered as selfish, evil doers?

Simon realizes he’s now an Etherian. This accounts for the transformations he’s experiencing.
But what of the sudden dematerialization? A simple explanation comes to him––once the last person alive who has a memory of an Etherian dies and crosses over, that Etherian leaves to make room for the new.

This is comforting to Simon. He knows he is remembered by many friends and loved ones. He hopes they, especially his young children, will remember him for as long as he remembered his father. Simon knows his father is remembered, and therefore must still be here. This gladdens his heart, and he sets forth to find him, to walk with him arm in arm, as in his dream.

I think we just cease to be. While it is comforting to think this is not the case, I see no evidence to support that. However, should I ever run into a ghost, I might have to rethink this.

We go nowhere, we cease to be, as death is akin to a neverending dreamless sleep.

Mouring would be unchanged I thought, you grieve for your loss. As an atheist I believe this life is all there is, my body is made up of the chemical elements I have consumed, shaped by my DNA, environment and lifestyle. When I die it all unravels and those elements are released.

I am a practioner of the Science of Mind. We say that we go back to the light. Basically that which is first cause, that which started it all...the multi verse.

We go back into the ground as nutrients for plants and so it goes on. you don't want to keep mourning her every year. she shouldn't have wanted that. id celebrate new life instead because that's what will become of what was your nan.

You just cease to exist.

Take a pencil and draw a single line on a piece of paper. That line represents a single life. The life starts and it ends. Where does the line go when it ends? Same place you go when you or I end.

Ashes to Ashes and Dust to Dust.It Is Nothing More to it !!!!!

Where you feel happy