As I Lay Ploozing

A friend of mine once suggested that his elderly, demanding father was refusing to die just so he could be a burden to his kids. 

Image: Teece Aronin

"My father," he said, "may never die. He isn't going gently into that good night, nor is he raging. He simply ignores Death."

That was more than 10 years ago, so my guess is that Death has gotten that man's attention by now.

I used to fear that there is no afterlife, dooming me to sputter out like a candle. Now, I see things differently, and my reasoning is this:

1. Either I go to Heaven, or I don't. Either way, I'm probably fine because I think I've lived the kind of life likely to get me in. But if Heaven doesn't exist, I won't know the difference - unless, by some oversight in the recordkeeping, I go to the other place. 

If Heaven doesn't exist, I doubt Hell does, or Purgatory, for that matter. Then again, I suppose there could be an afterlife that's not Heaven or Hell or Purgatory. If it's not Hell or Purgatory, that would be great, but if it's not Heaven, that could be bad, especially since we're talking about an eternity of something other than Heaven. If by some chance, there's an afterlife that isn't eternal, I might have to die all over again, which seems totally unfair. Then where will I be?

Wait - these are supposed to be reasons I'm not worried, so let me back up. 

2. If there is no afterlife, as I said before, I won't know that. My awareness will be the same as before I was conceived: zilch. Before I came to be on Earth, I wasn't trailing God all over Heaven, nagging Him like a toddler to hurry up and give me life on Earth. My fear of death was predicated on the notion that I would be miserable after death, but that would require an awareness of my lack of life, which means that I would have to be conscious and existing in an afterlife. Then again, I could be in Purgatory or Hell. Ugh. 

3. I'll get to play the harp, and when presented with the prospect of acquiring a new skill, such as harp-playing, I refuse to sweat little details like how I will suddenly know how to play a harp.

4. After I die, I get access to the vault where they store the answers to Earth's unsolved mysteries, such as why John Lennon ever let Yoko Ono sing. 

One thing that still bothers me, though, is that many of the words we use to describe the state or process of no longer living all sound so death-y.

Rather than die, I'd prefer to plooze, and I think we should replace the word death with plooze and dying with ploozing. 

Let's test plooze out by using it in a sentence, shall we? "Did you hear about Frank? He ploozed last year after a fall."

Doesn't that sound better, like Frank slipped and took an unexpected trip down a slide at a waterpark?

I was joking, but now I'm being serious:

If we believe in God, and statistics say more than half of Americans do, it becomes much easier to take another leap and believe in life after death. And then there's this: 

About a month after my mother died, I was lying on my bed, eyes closed. My mind was drifting, but I was fully awake, and I wasn't consciously thinking about her. Suddenly, I heard her voice, blossoming with delight, the state of being where she spent much of her Earthly life. 

"It is so wonderful!" she said.

Wait Till the Midnight Hour

"How would you like to walk through the cemetery with me at midnight tonight?

Your Name Here by Teece Aronin. Available at
RedBubble.com/people/phylliswalter.

This to me from my college gal-pal, Margie. I was barely out of my teens and Laurie was a few years older. 

"Are you kidding? Yes!"

"This'll be fun! I'll knock on your door at 11:30."

I thought about the upcoming adventure all afternoon. Would I be scared? No way. Margie was such a sweet girl; kind, funny, smart and reliable. If she said tonight would be fun, then tonight would be fun. 

But by that evening I was getting nervous and at 11:30 when Margie knocked, I jumped out of my skin. I opened the door and there she stood: five feet tall, glasses, a brunette with a pageboy haircut. She held a flashlight that was as big as she and she'd nearly buried herself in a black wool coat. It was October and nippy so I slipped my coat on, too. We arrived at the cemetery at 11:55 and waited until midnight to walk in. 

The darkness was near total. Branches trimmed out in decaying leaves were faintly silhouetted against the sky. Margie was in front of me fumbling with that steel pillar she called a flashlight and I was praying for her batteries to have more life than what was buried in the cemetery. And I was frustrated because I couldn't see her.

"Did you have to wear black?"

"Oh, I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking. Hang on - I'm trying to switch on this flashlight."

Blessedly it finally lit and we walked farther in. 

"Margie?" I asked. "Are you scared?"

"No! This is fun!" she bubbled, making me want to forget her adorable pluck and just knock her right down. "You?" she asked.

"Oh, you have no idea," I whined. I grabbed the back of her coat, the toes of my shoes just inches from the heels of her boots. 

Margie shined the flashlight in my face to read my expression, unintentionally blinding me. "You poor thing, You're fine. Really you are. But you want to know the real reason I wanted to do this?"

This was the part of the horror movie where the heroine finds out that the best friend is a homicidal maniac. In the morning, some grieving widow bearing flowers would stumble upon a corpse with a flashlight-shaped indentation in her scalp.

"No - I mean yes - I mean I guess," I answered, looking at her in a whole new horrifying light.

"Because someone told me they saw a gravestone in here with my name on it. I thought it would be fun to come find it."

"You mean there's a gravestone in this cemetery that says IDIOT?" 

"No, my last name," she said.

That was when Margie turned around, took one step and tripped. She fell forward and it didn't occur to me to let go of her coat, so I went with her. The momentum of the fall caused her arm to fling up - the arm that was attached to the hand that held the flashlight. The light swung up and flashed full onto a granite monument. The name engraved there: BYRNES. Margie's last name: Byrnes. 

We screamed, but Margie was the one who named names, mentioning a few you've seen in the bible. Then we scrambled to our feet and ran faster than two chunky little girls ever dreamed possible. We didn't stop until we skidded to a halt at the steps of Saint Gabriel Hall. 

"Wanna do that again tomorrow?" I gasped.

"#%!@ you!" she cursed - just not as sweetly as usual.