"Don't Fear the Reaper" A short story by Jonathan Hoffman
It was a late Friday night when you died. You were heading home at 1:00 am from an overtime shift at the downtown office. Your boss wanted you to finish the story about the old lady who discovered oil in her backyard. You left behind a wife and a young daughter. At an intersection you drive through every day on your commute back home, a drunk driver drove through a red light and T-boned your car, killing you instantly and painlessly. Your body was broken beyond repair. To be honest, it’s better you didn’t survive; every moment remaining in your short, crippled life would have been filled with excruciating pain.
You opened your eyes and that’s when you met me.
“Huh…where am I? You asked concerned. “What’s going on?”
“You died,” I told you. No point in trying to hide the fact.
“I was driving home from work…and there was this big light to my left.”
“Yes. It was a drunk driver.” I explained.
“So, I…I’m dead?” You asked me with a soul-shattering pain that was evident by the cracking in your weak voice.
“Yes.” This was always the hardest part of my job, witnessing the poor souls, whose light from their life was extinguished too early, come to the realization of their own mortality. “But don’t feel sad about it. Everybody dies at some point.”
You looked around. There was nothingness. Just you and me. “What is this place? Is this the afterlife? Is this heaven?” You asked with an emotion of disappointment like that of a child who opens a Christmas gift and receives socks instead of a toy robot.
“No”
“So, am I in hell? Oh god, what did I do to deserve this?” You muttered to yourself hysterically, while pulling at your hair.
“No, this isn’t hell, and you didn’t commit any wrong deeds in life to end up with me.” I said, trying to ease your worry. I could tell you were calming down; I could see you were breathing much slower now. You looked at me with curiosity. To you, I looked similar to a friend you had in college, maybe a fraternity brother or lab partner; you couldn’t tell. I wore acid washed blue jeans, converse shoes, a brown shirt, and had a pale face with calm blue eyes.
“Are…are you god?” You wondered.
“No, not really anyway. I guess the best way to explain it to you in your culture is that I’m death, the grim reaper, or Thanatos as the ancient Greeks called it.”
“Oh. But you look so familiar to me. I guess I always imagined a skeleton wearing a black robe or something and carrying a big scythe.”
“I can take on that form if you prefer.” I conjured up a scythe and the flesh on my body melted away revealing only bones.
Your eyes widened and you quickly said, “No, no. How you were before was better.” You turned away in shock.
“Heh, heh, yup. That’s the usual reaction when I do that.” I changed back to the other form. “You know people often think I look like a skeleton, but the reality is that I can morph into any image to try to make you feel comfortable.”
“Really? That’s cool, I guess. What do you really look like though? Do you have a true form?”
“Oh sure. Unfortunately for you, a sentient being’s mind can’t really comprehend my form. It isn’t something physical like the forms you’ve seen me in so far.”
“Wait a minute. Um, what’ll happen to my family, my wife and daughter; now that I’m dead?” You asked with the pain for information written on your eyes.
I smiled at you. “I like to hear that. You just died and even though you were a journalist who loved to learn the stories the world had to offer, and I don’t want to brag, but meeting death can be an interesting story, you still care for the well-being of your family. That’s genuine human decency right there, real good stuff.”
I put my arm around your shoulder and told you to walk with me through the void. “Where are we going? You asked me.
“Oh, nowhere specific. I just find it nice to walk while we talk.” I said. “Your wife will cry and grieve for years, but you were a young man and she a young woman, so eventually she will find love again to fill the void in her heart. Your daughter will remember you as perfect in every way imaginable. She was too young to grow contemptuous of you and your understandable human flaws. She will even grow up to be a journalist like you were, experiencing the world before settling down with a nice man in San Diego and raising two boys of her own, with the first born being named after you.”
“Heh…that’s good, I guess. I just really wish I could’ve seen her grow up; you know.”
“Sure. Every person has regrets in life, they are unavoidable. However, one piece of wisdom I can offer you as consolation is that it is better to have experiences, good and bad, and to have lived a life of regrets and have the fear of missing out on the future than to have not lived at all. Take this conversation we are having now. I can’t converse with the many stillborn that I meet. I simply send them on their way without giving them any sense of closure, because they never had a real personal consciousness to begin with. A life of regrets signifies a life of wants, a life of emotions, a life of actions or inactions, a life of quality in and of itself.”
You moved away from me so that you could look me right in the eye. “What, so should I just be content with only 27 years of life?” You probed me frustratingly.
I stared into your angry brown eyes and told you, “No, of course it’s fair to feel slighted, cheated out of the possibility of a longer, richer life. But you have to accept your life as a whole, no matter if you spent a day on earth or a century. Unfortunately, what happened to you on that road tonight was simply a case of being at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
We both fell silent. That was the first time in a while that I had been so heated in conversation with a person.
You broke the silence with a question, “So what happens now? Do I go to heaven or hell?”
I looked back at you with kind eyes, remembering that you were a young man, a naïve soul. I told you, “No. Those places don’t exist. I won’t sugarcoat things anymore, I have too much respect for your emotions to do that to you.”
“So where do the dead go?” You asked with genuine curiosity.
“Well, you will return to where you came from. The universe, the cosmos itself. Your individual consciousness will fade away and you will rejoin the ever-expanding universe and the collective consciousness.”
“The collective consciousness, what’s that?” You wondered.
“Oh sure, let me explain. The universe is a thing, like you and me. You know how in geometry you were taught that a square is a rectangle, but a rectangle isn’t a square. Well, that concept can be applied to us. A single human is part of the universe, but the whole universe isn’t made up of just humans. The universe is made of space, time, things like me, beings like you, stars, planets, etc., etc. All things end eventually and rejoin the universe.”
“I don’t understand. So, what was the point of it all then. Life I mean. Experiencing stuff, getting a job, raising a family, chasing my dreams, and experiencing such deep and terrible pain?”
“Experiences were the purpose for you and all your kind. Just like my purpose is to guide the dead back to the collective consciousness, or like a star’s purpose is to provide heat, gravity, and light. When you die, you take those mortal experiences and share it with the collective consciousness of the universe. With every life lived and physical phenomena in space occurring, the universe grows and matures. The universe is only a kid right now. It is trying to learn and grow up using everything that happens in it over the course of all-time. Let’s say your life was like picking a scab on your elbow to the universe. Well, you gained some stimuli by picking the scab and learned things from doing it. For example, you may have learned to enjoy picking scabs and that doing it too often would cause scars. Well, the universe learns about itself by gaining the experiences of your life in the same way.”
“So, I’m just a scab to the universe and I fade away forever then?”
“No, one of the first things you learn in physics is that matter can’t be created or destroyed, remember? So, you and I and your star and your earth are all a part of the universe and help shape it. It’s no different than how the bowl of cheerios you shared with your daughter this morning became a part of you, in both matter and the experience of eating them with your daughter. But the fundamental thing I want you to remember is that the cheerios, you, your wife, me, Mr. and Mrs. Florpim on planet Xerox 128 million light years away from earth, everything, and every phenomena together make up and educate the universe.”
You sat down, legs tucked in and arms wrapped around your knees. You sat there and thought for a long time. “Why? You asked me. “Why do all this?”
“Because one day, the universe will have experienced everybody and everything. Only then, will it become in conceivable terms, an adult.” I explained.
“What then? Are there other universe kids and fully matured adults? Where do they live, how do they function? What do they do, how are they…?”
I stopped you, “That info is, how you say, above my paygrade.” I placed my hand on your shoulder, and with a warm smile said, “Let’s just go along for the ride. At the end, we’ll find out the answers together. Think of it as experiencing the ultimate story.”
You stood up, ready to face whatever came next. “Okay, I think I’m ready. I can’t wait to chat with you, or uh myself again in the future when this all ends.”
“I look forward to it.”
And I sent you on your way.