switchsigh

Hey y'all.

I've been a naughty, naughty SG member for not updating my journal more often. Who's going to administer the spankings???

So, my dad finally passed away today. I'm kind of ignoring it right now. Pushing it aside. I'll deal with it later. We knew it was coming, I still cried today at work when my Mom called, and I know that no one gets out of this world alive. So if I feel the need to grieve at some point in the future, I'll do so then. To tell the truth, I did most of my grieving already when I found out he had cancer and with the several close calls with death during this last year that he previously had.

The only thing I really regret is our society's refusal to remember and celebrate life and its insistance on grieving as the largest part of the death and dying processing. The worst part of my dad's illness and death has been the number of people who approach me with pity - or worse: what they *think* is understanding - and tell me how sorry they are for what I'm going through right now. Yeck. Leeme alone. Give me a few hard drinks, let's listen to some great fucking raucus music and talk about how wonderful he was.

Strangely enough, my dad's death hasn't changed my views of heaven/hell/the afterlife/religion/god(s?). I honestly haven't given it much thought. I did have this very well-meaning bible-thumper coworker who tried to ascertain (several times) if my dad had accepted J.C. as his personal savior when he found out Dad was courting death, which made me wonder if maybe I should spend some time thinking about the subject of the afterlife and if my dad was going to roast, rise to heaven, be reborn or fade into oblivion.

And then I thought....nah.

I have an analytical part of me that refuses to truly and wholly believe in something if I haven't seen, smelled, heard, sensed, felt or read the scientifically sound research in an accreditted professional journal myself. I'm not saying I don't think there's a big guy or gal up there guiding us, or that minor gods/demons/angels/fae don't affect us in ways we'll never know, or that we did evolve from viruses. I'm just like....

why stress? Know one knows for sure. All we have are ideas, hopes, hallucinations of what might be...after. I like to think that at death we get to experience complete, unhindered, fully comprehensive understanding of the universe, ourselves, whowhatwhenwherewhy, quantum physics, why people like Jeffrey Dahmer exist, before we move on to...something. Maybe another life here on earth, maybe a different life on some other earth, maybe on a higher plane. I guess I really hate the idea of oblivion. I like to think there's something more to which we ascend or at least continue...

but that's just my idea, hope, hallucination.