What Do You Think Dead People Are Up To Right Now?

If there’s an afterlife, I hope people don’t have to stay the age they were when they died for all eternity. That would be awful. The whole place would feel like the audience of regional theater: just a grip of old people slowly nodding off and a few dozen kids who aren’t sure why they’re being punished.

If you were a rock star doing coke on top of an abandoned roller coaster and then you found out heaven was just 70+ year-olds eating canned peaches and going to bed at 7pm, you’d rethink your plan to live fast.

It’d be worse if you get to pick your age. I’d love to see my Opa again. He was this super charming guy: white hair slicked back, great laugh, and his hobby was hustling pool at the senior center. It’d be worth living a good life to get to hang out with that guy again. But if you asked him, I bet he wouldn’t have said, “I want to spend eternity as Alex’s cool Opa.” He was probably hoping that in heaven he’d go back to being a 22-year-old wealthy European sex machine.

I can’t think of many worse things than showing up in heaven and seeing opa fucking everybody.

Oma wouldn’t like that either.

Even though I never met him, my grandfather on the other side seemed amazing: he traveled with a circus, knew magic tricks, and in pictures always looks like he was about to tell a kid a cool secret. But my grandma, who I loved dearly, wasn’t his first wife. So do they hang out in heaven? Or is he there with his first wife, a woman he met when she was working as a burlesque dancer at the circus? Grandma lived a life of pure good, gets to heaven, and her husband pokes his head out of a carnie strip tent like, “Oh hai. This is exactly what it looks like.”

This is all assuming the Christian system, which I usually don’t (I was raised Catholic but I graduated young). The whole heaven/hell thing just feels a little too convenient.

“Let me get this straight. If I believe your thing, when I die I get marshmallows and orgasms forever.”
“Uh huh.”
“And all my friends are there?”
“Yep. Isn’t it great?”
“Cool cool. Wait, hold up a second, Slick. What about the people I don’t like? Are they sharing my marshmallows? I wouldn’t care for that at all.”
“Of course not! The people you don’t like go somewhere else!”
“Nice! Wait wait wait. Just thought of something. This other place, it isn’t better, is it? Because that would ruin my orgasms.”
“Boy you picked the right religion because the other place is WAY worse. The people you don’t like, they HATE the other place. It’s all black licorice and itches they can’t reach.”

It’s just too perfect, like a kid made the whole thing up. “My mom says if I’m good I get to eat a popsicle and hang out with my friends but Aiden called me a sissy during recess so he can’t come to my birthday party and he has to be on fire forever.”