What happens when we die?

 

This is a reflection of a dying person. While taking her last breaths she remembers that she was asked once: 'what do you think happens when we die?'

She was lying there on the ground covered with blood, she stared deeply at the stars above her.

“What happens when we die?" She wondered 

"Talking about myself.

Myself; My self.

That's the problem. That's the whole problem with the whole thing. That word: self. That's not the word. That's not right, that isn't ... That isn't.

How did I forget that? When did I forget that? The body stops a cell at a time but the brain keeps firing those neurons, little lightning bolts like fireworks inside and I thought I'd despair, or feel afraid, but I don't feel any of that, none of it, because I'm too busy. I'm too busy in this moment, remembering.

Of course. I remember that every atom in my body was forged in a star. This matter, this body is mostly just empty space after all. And solid matter? It's just energy vibrating very slowly, and there is no Me. There never was. The electrons of my body mingle and dance with the electrons of the ground below me and the air I'm no longer breathing, and I remember there is no point where any of that ends and I begin.

I remember I am energy, not memory, not self. My name, my personality, my choices all came after me. I was before them and I will be after, and everything else is pictures picked up along the way; fleeting little dreamlets printed on the tissue of my dying brain. And I, am the lightning that jumps in between, I am the energy firing the neurons, and I am returning. 

Just by remembering, I'm returning home.

It's like a drop of water falling back into the ocean of which it has always been a part. All things are a part. All of us are a part. You, me, my mother and my father, everyone who has ever been, every plant, every animal, every atom, every star, every galaxy. All of it. 

There are  more galaxies in the universe than grains of sand on the beach and that's what we're talking about when we say God. The One, The Cosmos, and its infinite dreams. 

We are the cosmos dreaming of itself. It's simply a dream that I think is my life, every time. But I'll forget this. I always do. I always forget my dreams.

But now, in this split of a second, in this moment I remember, the instant I remember I comprehend everything at once: there is no time, there is no death, life is a dream. It's a wish made again and again and again and again and again and again and on into eternity. And I am all of it. I am everything, I am all.

I am that I am.”

She died with her marveled eyes wide open, piercing the open dark sky, like if reaching to where she came from and saying: I'm back home..again!

Transcript from the 'Midnight mass' series.