Dead forever

My mother looked forward to being reunited with her mother when she
died, though she was never able to explain to me what form this reunion
would take. Would my grandmother be waiting at the gates of heaven,
arms outstretched? Would she be the same age as she was when she died?
Would there be anyone else there? If so, who? Mum found comfort in the
prospect of an afterlife, but I could never make sense of it. Not only
that; I found the idea repugnant. Did it mean being forced to drift
through eternity without any opportunity to escape? Did it mean that
your personal bit of afterlife was exclusive, so only a few people -
the nice ones, that you'd loved - were there with you? Otherwise, if
you were forced to share it with people you'd hoped you'd never see
again, it would be pretty hellish. So, who selects your companions?
Religious people would say that's God's job, but I've known people
who'd say they're not religious talk about not really knowing whether
there's an afterlife or not - they wouldn't like to be dogmatic about
it. It all gets very woolly and confusing.

Heaven and hell used to be the old-style religionists' carrot and
stick. The priests told ignorant, illiterate people that if they were
'good' (in a sexually-repressed, utterly subjugated sort of way) they
went to heaven when they died, and if they were 'bad' (in a
sexually-liberated, utterly bolshie sort of way), they went to hell.
There must have been a lot more women in hell, because they took the
blame for most men's problems - few could do anything right. So the
old-fashioned afterlife was in three sections - heaven, hell, and
purgatory, where you hung about in a sort of celestial Benefits Agency
waiting room while someone totted up your pluses and minuses. Poor
people had to wait around longer than rich people, who'd pre-paid
priests to pray and chant to speed things up a bit. You didn't escape
the class system because you were dead.

Nowadays, people will say that those old-fashioned ideas of heaven and
hell are rot. Instead, they talk vaguely in 'I'll see you again' terms
about people they've loved and lost, in a wishful-thinking sort of way.
Well, it might happen, you never know, they'll say. In my experience,
having talked to hundreds of people about death - because I have that
sort of job - the older you get, the less interested you are in an
afterlife. Really old people, whose bodies are worn out and causing
them problems, have had enough. It's mostly younger people who hanker
after a post-death reunion, especially if they've lost people who are
under fifty. It's understandable; they feel cheated. They haven't had
enough time together, so they want to carry on where they left off. In
these affluent times, with a National Health Service that's expected to
deliver the cure for everything that ails us, we expect a lot.

If there is an afterlife, I'd rather not go there, thank you very much.
Who wants to share eternity with a lot of dead people? Not me.