You can take it with you when you go.
The afterlife is a room filled with everything you have ever owned. When you arrive — when you die that is — all you can think is “huh.” All of that conventional wisdom of the living down the drain. You have everything. Everything you once called yours.
In your first steps, there are your childhood toys. Some, perhaps most, you cannot even remember having, holding, and cherishing as a relic of comfort when you hadn’t the faculty to understand much else. None are broken. Isn’t that a surprise? A nameless stuffed polar bear is still a bit tattered behind the ears — fur ruffled into prickly bumps, but not for lack of care.
Look further. There are piles and piles, and high-holy-hell there are piles, of clothes everywhere. It’s mostly junk. Underwear and whatnot. It takes you a while to find your favorites. That t-shit you insisted wearing every day in the fourth grade. That button down, you know that one, you wore in your early 20s when you believed it had the magic to get you laid. Your painting pants. Your summer job uniform. A screen-printed shirt that says “lick my balls” because your friends one summer thought it was funny. Everything.
There are ungodly (pardon the language) mounds of pens, pencils, sticks of gum, what-have-you. Let’s not even talk about the nickels. They fill an aquarium on the wall, right next to a modestly-large glass frame filled with cash and various degrees and legal certificates. The TVs are mounted on the wall adjacent to your cash. They’re all in working order: from the 4-foot wide monstrosities of the 90s to the wall mounted silk screen you bought right before, well, you know. They’re all playing different videos you shot at one point or another. On one of the fatter tubes, there’s a silly video playing of a high school English project. The assignment was to create a film that had a story line. So simple. But when you and your best friend heard the assignment, you took it as The Moment to begin a film career. You shot a fight scene at twilight — silhouettes of teen bodies running dizzyingly around are barely in focus. That was it for film. Soon after, you decided you wanted to be a writer.
O yeah, everything you’ve ever written is here too. Printed on the nice paper — what else did you expect? But every old work seems so juvenile now. Even that column you wrote last week. It’s on top of the pile next to a crate of used tissues. But don’t make too much of proximities here.
What junk. You’ve never seen so much. Then you wonder if you still have eyes, or maybe you have metastasized into something else. When you look in a mirror (there are 16 of them in here. One of which is broken. Death can’t fix some things.) you see hundreds of versions of yourself, in all the ages in your life. Every body you owned. You feel somewhere in between a cringe and a smile. The old man looks sad. The young one naïve. You begin to understand how those two, though wildly different, are related to one another. What died in one form, and what was passed on to the other.
There are no other people here. Another strike against the conventional wisdom. Damn it, the living are really wrong about the afterlife. Where are all my loved ones? you think. Perhaps they’re sorting through their own mounds of crap. Perhaps you’re all in the same room, separated by the stuff you shared in common? Nah, probably not. But this isn’t hell.
It’s very quiet in here — except for the tickings of the clocks and watches you’ve owned, and a pitter patter of a desk fountain you found at a garage sale. The TVs are on mute. (Good luck finding the remotes.) It’s obvious whoever created this space wanted to retain some sense of sanctuary. There’s no ceiling. Just a dark viscous sky. Like falling sheets of black fabric. Reminds you of a dress you once bought for someone else. She’s not here though. Guess you can’t own a person. But you knew that. But still, the realization is sad.
Onward. There’s really no where to go in particular. But there are such treasures to find here. Special things you lost are found. The photos destroyed in the flood are still here (because the water that took them away from you wasn’t yours). You spend a long time looking at them. Being dead has incensed your power of memory. They come in waves, the memories, triggered by the objects around you. These are ghosts as much as you are. You have a thought like, ‘mom was really beautiful then… before time decayed her to dust.’ And then she’s there, fully realized, for just enough time to get that feeling. And then she is not. You laugh as much as you cry. It all can get a bit much. Especially when it comes to the hard stuff. There’s your respirator for when you got sick. There’s the coffee mug your brother threw at you during a fight over a damned sickly dog (it’s a long story). There’s a lot of stuff you wish wasn’t yours. You chuckle a bit when you see a pile of baggage, realizing some great cosmic pun is at play. It’s reassuring to know God has a sense of humor.
It probably would take a lifetime to sort through everything. But hey, you’ve got the time. And there a lot of books and movies to keep you from getting too bored. Sorry, if you rented, it isn’t here. The point of sale is eternally binding. Who knew?
