That doesn’t mean inhabiting the world of the crank with lights going on and off, radios changing stations, items inexplicably falling off shelves signaling that your departed loved one is nearby and trying to get your attention. If you want to make your head hurt Google afterlife and read a selection of serious studies on the subject. What they all have in common is a belief that there is an afterlife however hard it is for our human understanding to grasp or interpret. What the philosophers, mystics and theologians also have in common is a rejection of the idea that when you die that is an end to it. For them there has to be more - they just can’t agree exactly what that is.
I have never taken a literal view of an afterlife. I used to understand the concept of heaven metaphorically. To be more accurate, I saw religious language as allegorical. An allegory can be more complex than a metaphor. It allows you to interpret a hidden meaning behind detailed religious narrative about God, spirituality and afterlife. Interpretation is not just a modern phenomenon to make sense of what the ancients accepted as literally true. The oldest scriptures contain lots of imagery too. The book of Revelation paints a picture of the New Jerusalem (heaven on earth). “It had a great, high wall with twelve gates, and with twelve angels at the gates. And the gates are never shut”
My own journey took me from using religious language which I understood metaphorically, to just not using language at all that I had to explain I didn’t take literally. It may sound harsh and depressing to dismiss the possibility of afterlife but it’s far from that. Poetry teaches that memory, friendship, inspiration, empathy, and most of all, love are powerfully real and enduring emotions. We don’t just forget about people when they die - just as we don’t forget about people when we are separated by distance. It is true that it becomes harder to keep enduring memories alive with the passing of time, but that’s not the same as forgetting about someone. It’s just our way of coping and moving on with life. Christina Rossetti captures that in her poem Remember - ‘Better by far you should forget and smile than that you should remember and be sad.’
Maya Angelou reflecting on the death of poet James Baldwin wrote.
‘And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed.’