The End is Where We Begin
A searing pain somewhere near my left temple, and the whole world exploded in sparks. Greens and reds blurred my vision, looking like psychedelic fireworks as I tried to see past the choppy bits of brown hair in my face. I really should have gotten a different haircut. Droplets falling from my forehead further blinded me as the unknown assailant smashed something strong and hard against my skull. Repeatedly, with so much force that I just buckled under the pressure. The only thing I could hear was a cold, high voice muttering about clean up and the unmistakable sound of a piece of heavy machinery coming right at me. I was told later on that they had to literally mop me up from the sidewalk. What a way to go huh?
I'm not the kind of person that anyone would be interested in brutally murdering. In fact, I'm completely boring in almost every single way, but we'll get to that bit later. It's pretty sad to say it but being killed by a random maniac was the most exciting thing that ever happened in my short sixteen years on this planet. My death was the subject of gossip and speculation for about three weeks before everyone gave up and lost interest. Way to make a guy feel appreciated everyone. I don't think that anyone besides my mother actually attended the funeral, after all, why go pay respects to a random classmate when you've got partying to do? I think maybe one teacher I was really close to got up to make a speech and it was really nice and sappy, full of sentimental crap like you'd expect to hear at someone's send off from this world. It was pretty surreal to think that it wasn't just random person's funeral I was watching, it was mine. After all the speeches and spiel about how I was too young and that my soul would surely ascend to heaven, the burial bit finally rolled around. It was a closed casket owing to the condition of my.. well me ( literally mopped up remember?) and Mom cried big fat crystal tears that I wanted to wipe away, as the cheapest coffin anyone could find found its, and my, eternal home.
I've found that being a ( ghost? spectoral entity? loose consciousness?) whatever I am, is pretty boring after a while. I've tried all the stereotypical ghost things, banging on walls, throwing random objects around, making moaning noises, the whole enchilada. But nothing's really worked. I spent the first few weeks after my abrupt removal from life sitting by my graveside and wondering what the heck I'm supposed to do now. It's not as if anyone gives you a manual when you're born that explains everything to you about life, so I don't know why I expected it of death. I started getting restless after a while,so I tried playing around with my new existence in different ways, with varying degrees of success. I can sort of float when I really really concentrate but it takes a lot of focus and makes me feel something like tiredness. Flying or any "cool ghost powers" seem kind of out of the question at this point, since I can barely muster the energy to leave the graveyard and visit my Mom, which was the first thing on my agenda once I figured out how to stand again. ( Oh yeah.. vertigo is still a very real thing for the dead, not fun.) Okay, I think I figured out why I've been so weak lately, I'm pretty sure it has to do with my proximity to my body since I went to the other side of town yesterday before I started feeling sick. I don't really want to test my theory but something tells me that I'm right.
Hmm.. What are the dead expected to do all day? In life we have expectations for what we need to do and why, pass school to get a job, get a job to support yourself, support yourself so you can get married, get married so you can have kids etc.. The only things I've accomplished as of my transition to the after life are to walk, sit, read a bunch of newspapers and magazines, and visit my mother to try and silently inspire her to get out of bed. Which she still hasn't done by the way. Is there such a thing as a post life crisis? Because I think that I'm having one. Good news! I think I've decided what my first project for this boundless free time I find myself with will be, drumroll please… a manual for how to settle comfortably into your after life! Remember that jibe I made about there not being a manual for this stuff? So why not write one? It's not like I don't have the paper or the time to do it, besides maybe it'll help some new little ghostie not make the same stupid mistakes I did. Or absolute worst case scenario, it gives me something to title's a bit of a work in progress but I think I've decided what I want to cover first.. the minute you realize you are in fact, dead.
The Comprehensive Guide to the Postmortem Experience
By Andrew R. Mason ( resident paranormal being)
Congratulations lucky contestant! You have the unique honor of no longer being among the living! Fortunately, you have this handy dandy guide to help you out. Enjoy!
The First Few Minutes
Okay, so you've probably died a semi-peaceful death, and if it was anything else I apologize because this part is going to be really hard for you. Take it from by Blunt Force Trauma and literal Liquification ( not sure how honestly). The best thing you can do at this point is coming to terms with everything. This might involve screaming, crying, kicking, denial, etc.. and it's all totally fine. You just went through something really traumatizing, it's okay to feel everything that comes with it. Peaceful goers kind of get a pass on this one but feel free to do it all the same. Wherever you passed on is probably going to become a place you do not want to be. So go ahead and get out of dodge, run as far and fast as you need to until you can think clearly again. Good? Ok, next step is to get everything clear in your mind. This might be harder for some than others, again looking at you violent deaths, but you need to have an idea of what happened so you can cope with it. Did Great Grandma Jean hit you on the head with her frying pan and now you're holding a book in her kitchen? Dead. Did you just go to bed and wake up with a random leaflet on the pillow beside you? Dead. Did you trip and swear that the snap you heard was not your neck, but now you're holding a stack of pages? Dead. Dead. Dead. It might seem cruel to say it but you need to know this as one hundred percent fact. You. are. Dead.
I'm proud of how the manual's going honestly, I haven't written much yet because I want to keep it consistent with what part of the "death transition process" I'm going through. I'm keeping busy in other ways too, trying to look after Mom is practically a full-time job now that she's mobile again. Which I'm really glad for because she was starting to scare me by not getting up or leaving the house, though now it seems like she went full 360 and is going everywhere and anywhere constantly. I discovered something else interesting, you know how dogs sometimes bark at nothing or cats bristle when you're the only thing in the room besides them? Well, that might be because one of us ( spirits? floating things? disembodied souls?) whatevers is hanging around. When I went to visit Mom the other day, the neighbor's cat started hissing and spitting like crazy while puffing herself up, she didn't like me when I was alive so I'm not surprised she gets spastic around me now that I'm dead. Still, it's kind of interesting. Why are animals tuned into something humans aren't? Is there other stuff out there that we don't know about? I'm not ruling anything out of the realm of possibility now that I'm something once considered impossible.
Another thing that I've noticed is that I'm not becoming as detached from everyone still living as I thought I would. Obviously they're going to be a part of any self-respecting "whatever's" existence, if nothing else, than to remind us of what we once were or had. But Mom is becoming the center of my existence again and even Sadie ( the grumpy neighbor cat) is a predictable part of my weekly routine. I've been considering adding a section in the manual on animals and their ability to detect the presence of something else, since I have a lot of time to both think about this stuff and write it down. I was never the best student so I'm sure everyone would be surprised to see me writing this much now.
The First Couple of Days
Good job! You realized the truth of being dead and managed to get yourself to a better state of mind. So where do you go from here? Yeah, I wonder that too. But your best option right now is to try and give yourself closure as much as everyone loved ones aren't the only ones coping with your sudden demise you know. Go to your funeral, keep an eye on your loved ones ( guilty of this one myself), scare the crap out of your friends so they stop crying over you for a minute, whatever feels pright to you at this stage. If you don't want to see your family or friends and instead want to mope around your graveyard and/or burial place for a while, that's also okay. Just don't let this part of your death get you down. You know how they say as a teen you have your whole life ahead of you? Well, now you have your whole death. Eternity, or however long we continue to exist. A whole new blank slate of existence. Just think about all the possibilities.
It's been six months since I died. Wow, writing those words somehow makes them feel more real than saying them out loud. Not too much has changed for me really, but I've come to a couple conclusions about how I want to spend the rest of my afterlife. You know how life can get really dull and depressing without a purpose? I don't want for that to be me again. I don't want to spend days and nights staring down at my bloated corpse and wondering, "Why me?". Or weeks following my mother around town as if her presence would somehow fulfill my thirst for a reason to exist. Life kind of dumps you right onto a bus speeding toward an unknown destination. The people around you don't answer your questions because they don't have the answers either, the turns sometimes throw you against the walls and windows but you can never find anything to grasp against. And then, after riding that unknown bus for a period of time, they suddenly stop and throw you to your equally unknown destination. That destination is where I'm at now, trying to make sense of the purpose of anything is like trying to hold sand, some always falls through your fingers and back onto the beach. Whatever the supposed reason for my being here and my existence in the first place, I'm not going to concern myself with it. My life was never really mine, but this? This time to just exist and act? It's mine, and no one's going to take that away again.
Welp.. I've gone and done it now. Goodbye sweet solitude, you shall be dearly missed. Last night, I was stargazing while floating ( oh yeah I can do that now) and just enjoying the peace and serenity of an undisturbed fall evening. The stars were bright, the moon was glowing, a gentle breeze tickled my nose… I was on my way to falling asleep. Can I still do that? Hmm.. oh well. And I may have been a teeny tiny eensy weensy bit melancholy about the whole forever alone thing. Then I heard an unfamiliar and unwanted sound. A loud meow, not six feet from where I was blissfully drifting. And out from the shadows of the stones steps? You guessed it, Sadie I-hate-you-so-much-I'll-literally-eat-your-shoelaces cat. At first I was really confused, I mean why would my neighbor's cat randomly follow me home to the graveyard? But then, the pieces started coming together in my head. Sadie was really old, she was probably four the first time I met her, which was ten years ago. The past few times I'd seen her she was moving slower than normal and not hissing at me as much ( I chalked it up to her old age overcoming her hatred of me). And, finally, my apparent subconscious plea for company. Dang it.
The Weeks Following "The Event"(aka Finding Something To Do)
Now you're probably thinking something like "What the heck do I do now?" or " Man this whole afterlife thing is seriously boring." Well, this is where you're at so you may as well make the most of it right? Is stalking your relatives not occupying your time like you thought it would? Take up the knitting needle and yarn and teach yourself to knit blankets for the local homeless dogs! Is your moping ground full of leaves and tree branches from your comings and goings? Host a cemetery cleaning day! Gotta keep your home nice right? Never know when a random mourner will drop by. Find yourself with an aching need to reorganize something? Break into your loved ones house and clean it for them, chances are they aren't doing much these days. Props to them if they're actually out of bed. Have a dream of being a semi-productive member of society? "Get a job" at a location and help pick up the slack with reorganizing and restocking everything. Are you completely lonely and depressed? Adopt a ghost animal! A rambling walk through the woods will reveal multitudes of passed-on critters just waiting to be loved. A warning though, ghost raccoons are still raccoons and will not appreciate being treated like cats.
This cat is absolutely crazy. I can see why her owner left her in the backyard most days, geesh. Everywhere I go she follows. Going for a completely innocent float around the city? She's there,meowing loudly enough to wake the dead( pun intended) and pawing her way through every bush we come across. Trying to visit anyone? Completely out of the question, because for some reason no one can hear me but they can hear Sadie. And boy does she have a mouth on her. What's all the meowing for? Is she looking for something? Does she not realize that she's dead and still wandering? And most importantly, why the heck is she following me around? If she wants someone to follow,why not let it be her actual owner? Or any other "whatever" still around?
Sadie-related problems aside, another issue has presented itself recently, more and more people are coming to the cemetery ( aka my home, please be neat and don't knock the stones over!) , moreso even than the drunk college kids or the spooky thrill seekers. They don't dress or act like mourners and , to the best of my knowledge, no one's "moved in" since I've been here, so why do they keep coming? The weirdest part is that they come and do the same thing every single time! They poke around at the gravestones and wave around something that looks like a cross between an exploded remote and a toaster,but sometimes they get excited and the thingy starts to beep but they never find anything. What are they looking for? There's nothing here other than rocks,bones, and weeds. Well, I guess I'm here too ,but in most cases I don't count. I think the longer I observe people, the more I can really see and understand them, wonder what I could have done with the knowledge when I was still alive?
Tips for the Unrepentantly Restless Soul ( aka Dude, Chill Out)
Right, well assuming you're the type that gets caught up in new things, you've probably found fifty trillion things that need doing, done, and finished. And not just right now, but right this very instant oh-my-gosh I can't even, done. You probably think that now you've got all the free time in the world than this, that, and the other thing are all possible. Planting a flower garden? Building an entire neighborhood for the homeless? Kissing every single attractive person you float past? All excellent ideas, but you might start to succumb to something I've dubbed " Post-Mortem Productivity Syndrome" , I guess PPS for short. That's basically when you get so caught up in doing things and acting constantly, that you forget to take time for yourself. Despite the utterly limitless time and potential you now posses to do good things and learn and grow, time is still required for self-care. Cut yourself a little slack, you were a flawed human for a while and now you're a flawed post-consciousness of one. Take a nap every now and then, laze around and give your favorite ghost animal a scratch on the head, catch a concert of your favorite band. Death doesn't have to be a job you know, but basically, don't expect to become a superhero or god over night and you should do fine.
I swear to whatever sort of deity is out there that this cat is going to be the freaking death of me! Ok, technically you can't die twice, but I'm sure the universe would make an exception for Sadie the Collector of All Things ( wonder if I should get her a collar that says that?) . How many cats do you know that literally present you with corpses and spirits? Every day, she's been bringing me the bodies of mice,which are closely accompanied by their wayward spirits. I've done my best to bury the corpses, but the furry post-consciousnesses are still running around! If she were capable of it, I'd swear that she was doing that and bringing mice into the cemetery just to annoy me. I don't know just how old this place is, but a lot of the stones are worn down and I'm pretty positive none of them get any visitors. Heck, I don't get any visitors and it's been… how long has it been? I don't know, a while. I try to keep the place maintained for the few weirdos and mourners that do come by, and I do attempt to rotate out the old bouquets with fresh ones. Still, it's not enough, the grass is almost slate grey ( from all the decomposing bodies?) and the front gate squeaks louder than most of the mice.