Chapter 1 (continued)
I also wondered why I wasn’t hearing or seeing my departed friends and family… I did see a number of people who’d been standing around me when we died. “What a ripoff” I thought “I’m going to be greeted in the afterlife by nothing but strangers and some millenia dead Jew.”
After several minutes of this I’m really getting impatient. Getting to your final resting place shouldn’t take so long. Finally a bit of light began to come into focus on the horizon. “A horizon in the infinite plane of death? What a thoughtful and homey touch.” I mused as the light grew closer (and naturally larger). Eventually it grew clear that I was not approaching a gate of pearls, gold, or even papier maché, it looked a bit like some forest. I was really getting depressed now, I didn’t want to go to the Happy Hunting Grounds… I don’t know the first thing about hunting.I racked my theological knowledge for other wooded afterlives (that didn’t involve hunts). Just about the time I was entertaining the idea that I was being reincarnated as some animal I came tumbling out onto grass and into a tree. NOW I felt pain. I was still human I noticed, and I still seemed to be myself, or at least I was someone who was wearing my clothes.Looking around I decided I must be me, since the others all still looked like they did on the way here. I then bent to the task of looking around me for signs of the rest of the human race. I was under the assumption that it should be pretty full of people around here with all the crusades, inquisitions, world wars, and other ways we’ve tried to eradicate ourselves. There were about two dozen people that I could see any sign of, and they’d died with me.***
