We'll meet again...

There are subjects that we wordmongers love to discuss, most times because we know that you readers are sure to lap it up. We love writing and you love reading all about political chicanery, corruption, double dealing, scandal, sex and grumbling about the government, all in embroidered tones that remind me of a letter I once read in the Telegraph when still in my salad days from a Disgusted from Tunbridge Wells published at a time when noms de plume were still de rigueur.

There are other subjects, though, that take both you and I right out of our comfort zones rather like a nightmare. A psychoanalyst I knew once told me that a nightmare is when dreams coincide with reality. Apparently, one can dream about all sorts of awful things: being the protagonist in the chainsaw massacre, being raped by King Kong and other remote improbabilities which one will never remember in the morning. What creates the nightmare is its relationship with your waking life. That's when the horror hits you, straight between the eyes.

One subject which is a total no no is death. Not Death in general, that strange, capricious and quixotic spirit that wrote that exquisite novel The Book Thief but the spectre that lies in wait and hovers above us laughing silently with slavering toothless gums and staring at us with avid sightless eyes as we scan the Obituary columns of this newspaper every day to see how many of us the Grim Reaper has scythed off into oblivion.

Discussing our own death and not other people's is bound to make us feel a trifle uneasy and uncomfortable simply because of its inevitability. When I say "other people" I mean the world in general. We may feel very sorry for all those dying of hunger and disease, those being systematically blown to smithereens in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and those victims of nature's occasional flare-ups but we do not mourn for them as if it were our nearest and dearest. No, we just don't.

November has been designated as the month during which we remember our dearly departed as they are euphemistically called. It is probably because November is the harbinger of winter that it has this bleak connotation.

During Mass on November 2, All Souls' Day, the priest was perorating about how death is the gateway to another state of being and how we are to be transformed "in the twinkling of an eye" into a glorious body in an idyllic life when just behind him someone with a more pragmatic view of the subject had affixed these 18th century plaques showing a pair of rather off-putting skulls and crossbones in rather pretty cartouches.

We have all lost someone we are close to. We are all mortal. We have all felt those terrible anguished pangs of incurable pain that we feel as our loved ones are taken away from us in a variety of ways to this "other life" where one day, we are told by the pundits, we will meet again! I cannot listen to that WWII Vera Lynn song without thinking of it at funerals.

I sometimes wonder how we would appear to each other. If I died aged 90 something looking like a badly mummified cat would I then be transformed into what I looked like in my prime like Miss Jean Brodie? Would I see my loved ones as they were in their last days; specters writhing in pain too horrible to contemplate or would we meet each other at the height of our beauty, charm and grace?

Nobody has ever returned from the other side, wherever that other side is, so therefore man invented this thing called Faith. This strengthens us to face the unavoidable trials that all of us, rich or poor, strong or weak, ugly or beautiful, will undergo before being cast into Tartarus, or wherever, ourselves.

Of course, I would love to be assured, and so would you, that there is somewhere congenial that one could go to after breathing my last, a sort of Casino Maltese-like place where everyone knows or knows about everybody else. You may smile at this point. But, being dead serious now, do we actually believe this?

Being Jesuit-educated I do have some vague recollection of what this more intellectual order thought about the subject; namely that the afterlife, heaven if you like, is the enhancement of all we enjoyed in our lives with nothing going wrong.

Will I be wielding a paintbrush churning out masterpiece after masterpiece? Will I be glued to the latest PC tapping away as I am now at a Pulitzer prize-winning opus? If I could do that what, in heaven, would Dickens and Picasso be doing? May they, and eventually us too, rest in peace.

kzt@onvol.net