Douglas Adams Quote on the Afterlife

Leif was a huge fan of Douglas Adams, as I've posted before. Today I saw a Douglas Adams quote that Leif would have found profoundly amusing, at least in the time before he decided to kill himself, and knowing Leif, probably even then. He had a wonderful sense of humor and irony.

"He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife."

About this quote, Leif would have probably speculated about why the person quoted hoped there wasn't an afterlife . . . but more likely he would have known just what book it came from and why. Leif himself was an agnostic. Sometimes he said he was an atheist, but then would say he really was an agnostic. He said he liked to hope that there was a benevolent deity, but that he saw no evidence for it. There were quite a few women he dated who tried to convert him to fundamentalist Christianity and he did not appreciate their efforts to "save" him. He felt that if there was such a deity, he would not condemn people to eternal misery. Another one of his favorite quotes, which I've written about before, one that he used as a sig line on Zaon, was, "Maybe this planet is another planet's hell." by Aldous Huxley. I think Leif had some tiny hope that there was an afterlife, but not a belief.

I chose this photo of the family because it was taken about the time Leif became enamored of Douglas Adams, when he was in junior high school. Peter Anthony was a cadet at the Air Force Academy and took a science fiction literature class, where he was introduced to Douglas Adams. He was so taken with Adams work that he insisted the whole family had to read at least "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," and we all did. All of us except Peter W. read the entire series and we had a lot of fun talking about all the absurdity in the books.

The photo was taken in September 1987, right after Peter Anthony's first cadet summer, at the home of his Air Force sponsor, virtually the first time he was allowed off the Academy grounds to have a "normal" meal without all the cadet constraints. It was actually a little before he took the sci fi course, but the only photo I have of all of us together around that time. It was a good visit.

26 Months Without Leif

Today it's been 26 months since Leif's death and it is still a shock. The mind still plays tricks, wanting us to think of him as alive, not wanting to let him go. He looks so alive and vital in his photos, looking out at me with those warm brown eyes.

This is another photo I had never seen before my cousin Marji sent it to me. It was taken almost exactly 19 years ago, on June 7, 1991, in Oregon when we were visiting Multnomah Falls with my Uncle Jerry. Seems amazing the weather was so cool, as we experience baking heat in Florida at the same time of year. Leif, Peter W. and I look so much younger and happier . . . and we were.

How I wish I could take Leif on one more trip . . . or many more trips. I'm glad we had the opportunities we did to be with him.

Someone commented on my last blog post, asking whether I believed in an afterlife. I've written about that on the blog before. I can conceive of the possibility, but find it improbable. However, there are so many incredible things about life and this universe I cannot say it's not possible, though even if there is an afterlife, I doubt very much that it is much like our conceptions of it.

The idea of an afterlife is immensely comforting to many people, but for me, the idea that I might see Leif again someday doesn't remove the fact that I miss him now, that I ache for the misery he went through, that I am sad for his loss and ours.

Is Leif Free?

Tuesday, March 2nd, as I was resting in the afternoon on board the NCL ship Norwegian Sun, I was thinking how we had hoped to take Leif on another cruise, and how our first NCL cruise with him when he was 18 was such a special experience for him. I was thinking that this particular cruise would not have been a good one to take him on because there are so few people under 60 on board, except for the cadt snd crew, and then thinking how hard it is to realize that the handsome young man who was on that Caribbean cruise was so far from the unhappy, overweight man I found dead on his kitchen floor nearly 15 years later. How could his life, so promising, go so horribly wrong?

At that moment it was as if I thought from Leif was in my head and he was saying, "Mom, don't you know I'm free now? The pain is over. Be glad for me."

In one sense, that was like the lifting of a burden, but my answering thought was that his pain might be over, but mine was not, and I will always be asking why he had such a painful life and found no way out of that pain but death.

How am I to understand these "messages"? Are they from him (though I have never felt his presence after death) or are they the inventions of my own mind, conjured up from all I know of him and what I need to "hear"?

How I wish he had found his soulmate, his purpose, his health in body and soul, and lived to enjoy the kind of life Peter and I have together.
-----------------
This photo is of Leif at a woods playground near Camp Zama, Japan called Kodomo no Kuni (Children's Pkayground). It was in 1981, I think, when he was 6 years old.

What is there after death? A host of questions

Since Leif's death I've thought many times about the possibility of some kind of afterlife. I never had any firm, dogmatic beliefs about it, no particular religious teaching I subscribed to. When I was in high school, extrasensory perception and reincarnation fascinated me and I did a lot of reading about it. I was interested in comparative religion and read about many religious beliefs. In the past ten years I did more reading, research about ghosts as background for the ghost stories I was writing, but still, I did not settle on a firm belief.

And that's all it could be, belief, since we have no real proof of life, of any kind, after death. There are many experiences people have had that they claim proves the existence of ghosts, or communication with those who have passed over to the "spirit realm." There are people that claim to have measured the soul coming out of the body, but even if they have, who knows where it goes? Does it have memory and personality? Does it maintain that individual integrity or dissipate?

There's not a one of the ideas surrounding the continuation of the individual soul or personality after death that doesn't have huge problems that belie logic or even imagination. Yet, people believe. It seems to be a hallmark of just about every religion, the belief that we continue to exist in some form after death. As I wrote in the afterword to Trespassing Time, "Is belief in ghosts only superstition or gullibility? Or is it openness to an experience beyond our daily lives? A faith in the continuance of the soul after death?" How can we know?

When I was writing ghost stories and doing a lot of school and community programs, people, both adults and children, would ask me whether I believed in ghosts. I would tell them that I had "an open mind." I couldn't quite believe, yet I admitted the possibility. There are so many things in our world, our universe, that are fantastic and seemingly impossible; why couldn't this be true, too? Maybe we just don't know enough. Many of these people told me of experiences they believed were visits from the dead, though in truth, most were more like coincidences that made them think so, like the mother who saw a falling star and felt it was a message from her son. A few were harder to explain and might have really been such a visit, like the story told to me by a well-known author about a visit from a dead soldier in the barracks, in the night, asking him to tell his family what had happened to him. At the time he appeared to this man, no one yet knew this soldier was dead.

And yet . . . . since Leif's death, I find myself being less open-minded. Is it just because he has not visited or communicated with me? (Or maybe I'm just not open and sensitive enough to know it?) All of the ideas about life on another plane of existence define a barrier between the worlds. If it were easy for the dead to come back and talk to us, I'm sure many more of us would have had that experience. Maybe the dead, if they yet live, don't even remember their former existence on earth. Maybe they are not supposed to remember us. Does the butterfly remember being a caterpillar? Could death be a form of metamorphosis? It doesn't seem likely. The caterpillar's body is not found dead and decaying; it has truly changed into the new form.

Where do all the new souls keep coming from, as the population of the earth continues to rise dramatically?

Is it just wishful thinking, not only for our loved ones but for ourselves, that we persist in believing we will "live" after death? Are we just not able to comprehend and accept that death is the end?

Why should people be the only ones to go on after death? Many animals have conscious intelligence. What about them?

If there is another existence and there are ghosts, why do some peole become ghosts, ostensibly a few, and the others do not?

Then I think about Leif specifically. He did not believe in a life after death, or in God, and yet I think he hoped both might be so. If he were to be surprised after death and find himself with a new form of existence, what would he do? Our egocentric minds seem to think that our dead loved ones either spend their time hanging around watching us or waiting to welcome us into the hereafter, but why would they do that for years and years and years? Surely if they are "born" to a new form of existence, there is far more to that existence than watching their old world and waiting eternally. How utterly wasteful and boring it would be to spend eternity like that. Perhaps there would be a period of letting go, and then they'd get on with a new "life."

And someone like Leif, leaving this world of his own volition because of unhappiness, pain and debt, why would HE want to hang around and watch it? Would he WANT to watch his parents grieve? Would he WANT to come back to contact them . . . and tell them what? Why he did it?

We think we want to know, or at least know what he would have to say about it, but it could be even more painful. Maybe we would be confronted with his anger. Maybe we would learn things we don't want to know. Maybe he would find it too painful to tell us, to watch us deal with it.

Maybe he would be anxious to get on with his new life. For someone who had as his signature on the ZAON forums the Aldous Huxley quote, “Maybe this world is another planet's Hell,” this world would probably be one he would leave as far behind as he could, once he had taken that step.

If he is somewhere and still Leif, I hope he is happier, whether he comes back to "visit" or not. If I knew he were now in a happier life, I would still miss him and grieve for what he went through on earth, but I would be glad for him. I can't be that, though, because I have no way to know.

Beliefs are one thing. Actions are another. I still talk to him every day, and I probably always will . . . . whether I believe he is there to hear me or not.

---------------------------------
The photo of Leif with the telescope, which he was probably pretending was a big gun of some kind, was taken in June 1982 in Japan. He was seven-and-a-half years old.

Leif - Self Portrait - December 31, 2002 - Manhattan, Kansas - Age almost 28

It was a gorgeous day today, 83 degrees and sunny, perfect for cycle riding, with BOB (big orange ball, as Leif called the sun) pleasantly warm and soft balmy breezes. Tonight there is a brilliant full moon in the sky. I always think of Leif if I go outside at night. I'm not sure why, whether it's because he was a night owl like me, or because of his love of space and science fiction. I'd like to think he could in some way enjoy this day, this evening, but he is not here.

The mind thinks of some odd thoughts. Today, as I was musing about BOB and Leif, I wondered how, if there is an afterlife, a spirit can "see" when it has no eyes. Would it sense things entirely differently?

This photo is one of the many self portraits Leif took and it was taken at the same time as the one he put on his MySpace page. It is still there. He will forever look 28. It was at the time when he was coming out of his depression, anticipating graduating from Kansas State University in the spring. He was more hopeful and optimistic. It was a good time. He liked to discuss politics and history, and was passionate about it. I wish he were here to discuss those things now.

The photo of the moon I took here in Florida, when it looked much as it did tonight. There is something about the moon that is calming and uplifting. I've now made it through eleven months since Leif died. I will always miss him, but I am beginning to enjoy the beauty around me again, at least at times.

Wishing Upon a Star

When I was a child, we often played outside until or even after dark, all year around, and enjoyed watching the "stars come out." We didn't have all the light pollution in Manhattan, Kansas then that's there now, and we could see a stupendous number of stars and the glorious Milky Way. I remember lying on my back and watching the stars in the summer, along with the fireflies that were numerous then.

I had a Little Golden Guide for Stars and in those days, I was fascinated with the heavens. I learned to find many of the constellations and planets and loved to watch for "shooting stars." One of the highlights of my childhood was seeing the beautiful Northern Lights twice, once in Canada and once an amazing display of red Northern Lights that came as far south as Manhattan, Kansas.

When I was in the fifth grade and had to do a report, I chose to do one on astronomy and called the university to find out if there was anyone who could help me. It turned out that just the person I needed lived all of one block from me. I called him up and "invited myself over." As an adult, I now wonder what he thought of some little fifth grade girl calling him up like that. I'm no longer sure, but I think his name was Jack Robinson. I wish I knew for sure, because he was great. He not only answered my questions but revealed that there was a small telescope on the roof of the chemistry building, which was where my father taught organic chemistry.

Between the two of us, we engineered a field trip for my whole fifth grade class to go up to the roof of Willard Hall at Kansas State University and look through that telescope at the heavens. I remember seeing the craters on the moon, the rings of Saturn, four of Jupiter's moons. To children today, having grown up in the Space Age with incredible photos from the Hubble telescope and space missions, seeing what we saw would be less than stellar, but for us, it was the window to other worlds and it was a highlight of my childhood.

Both my sons took after me in their interest in the stars, but their interest wasn't in identifying them. They were interested in the future, in science fiction, in colonizing the universe, in space travel.

Friends of Leif's have said they think he must be traveling in space now, maybe hanging onto a comet with his hair on fire.

Leif did not believe in God or an afterlife. He was an agnostic, primarily, I think because the orthodox beliefs of organized religion did not make any sense to him and because he fervently believed that our religions have caused so much death, destruction and hatred in the world that they deserve to be destroyed. He could not conceive how a god that could create the universe could be the god of those religions, and saying that he "believed in God" would allow people to think he believed in the god of those religions. He did appreciate many of the teachings of inspired religious leaders, but felt their followers had perverted their vision and misused their words.

Regardless of that, I think he wished he could believe in some kind of divine creator, one not defined by our human failings and beliefs.

I don't know if there is an afterlife, but if there is, I think Leif must be mighty surprised. If there is one, I hope it is a good one for him, better than the crushing load of disappointments, problems and health issues he faced as an adult in this one.

I will never look at the sky the same way again since Leif's death. I have always loved the sky, the sun, the clouds, the everchanging beauty of the sunrises, sunsets, storms building, cloud shapes and colors. I have loved the heavens at night. Now, I think because we associate death and heaven with the sky, whenever I look at the sky, I think of Leif. I wonder whether there is anything left of that powerful mind, that imposing personality. Like him, I doubt that there is. I haven't felt his presence, though I suspect that if there were an afterlife for Leif, he would not spend it here trying to contact those of us still alive.

When I look at the night sky, I will always, always, think of him and say that childhood wish poem:

Star light, star bright,
First star I see tonight,
I wish I may, I wish I might
Have the wish I wish tonight.

I will never get my wish, for I wish for Leif back, alive and happy. I will never get it, but I will never, ever stop wishing.

----------------------

The photo I've posted is one from the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab site.