LIFE AFTER DEATH - by Evin Donohoe

After death – after your body has truly broken down and all semblance of a human consciousness is irrevocably eradicated from this plane of existence – it is then that your essence, your super-consciousness, is drawn through the entire vastness of the cosmos, experiencing and learning all things at once. Then you get to have a dinner party with five versions of Jack Nicholson, all at different ages. They are thrilled to see you.

After death, even though you don't have a body anymore you get to have a consciousness that resembles the one you have now and keep all of your memories. (How nice!) Which is extra cool, because real living humans can suffer from dementia or traumatic brain injuries or just flat out forget things, or even undergo wholesale shifts in personality type after suffering from strokes and things of that nature. But in the afterlife you still get to be the real 'you', the realest 'you', and you get to be it extra hard because, why not, it's the afterlife.

After death, the suspicions and beliefs of many superstitious humans are confirmed, and you discover incontrovertibly that reincarnation is a thing and that you get to go 'back' soon. Your next life is essentially randomised each time but in that post-life/pre-life stage before you commence, you're allowed to pick a number of 'special features' for whatever life you are about to lead – one or two or three things that will hold true for this next life no matter what else happens. Some examples might include “Car never breaks down” or “Never pays for drugs.” Other examples might include “Has at least one nice parent” or “Is not an awful person” or “Gets at least one consequence-free murder.”

After death, in the room beyond, you once again become privy to the memory of how this whole deal actually works, and that is this: You, your consciousness, your you-ness, is living through every human life that ever lived, in order. Every grandparent, every tyrant, every standard joe, every child who died too soon, every beggar, every person that ever there was – one by one you will live through and experience their lives as your own life, in painstaking real time, and you will have no memory of any previous lives or any knowledge that there are countless lives left to be lived. You even get to be Shakespeare at one point, because you get a go at everyone, and that one's probably going to be pretty special.
Finally, at the end of human history, you will have lived every life, and you will have felt every experience from every angle and know all that it is possible for a human to know. And every other person who ever lived will have done this, so you will all really be just the one person, and you will all be countless billions of people too. Indeed you will all have to sit down amongst yourselves and figure out whether you are just one consciousness, alone, that once split itself into countless billions of incongruous, dysfunctional moving parts so that it could experience some variety for once, or whether you really are all a multitude of separate personalities – but personalities who have all experienced each other's lives exactly and are all comprised of exactly the same pieces and so you might as well just be a single consciousness anyway. Is this what the Buddhists and drug users talk about when they say “We are all one?” In any case, it could get lonely in the afterlife once all human lives are said and done. But also maybe not.

After death, there are two rooms that you go through before you go on to explore the afterlife at large. The first room is small and softly lit. Inside it there is a comfortable sofa and a big screen TV. A tub of popcorn sits on a pedestal by the sofa. Someone appears and calmly explains to you that you have died. They next tell you that you are about to watch seasons one-through-seven of Joss Whedon's hit TV show Firefly, from an alternate reality where that was allowed to happen. And, they brightly continue, since you're dead now you don't even have to sleep or take toilet breaks. You can watch in one relentless stream from beginning to end, a whole one-hundred-and-ten hours of quality television, non-stop.
After the thrilling conclusion of Firefly, you go into the second room. This room is large and dark, a gigantic screen taking up an entire wall, control panels and monitors filling out the floor. It resembles something like the control room that NASA would design if they had as much money and time as they wanted and prioritised aesthetics over functionality but still considered functionality very strongly.
This room is the stats room. In here, you can access every objectively measurable fact about your recently ended life that you could ever care to know. Ask one of the control panel operators, for example, “How many times did I swear?” and he or she (because there are still genders in the afterlife, in addition to there still being consciousness and art and meaning) will bring it all up on the big screen with graphs and charts, like in the cricket coverage.
Questions this room could tell you the answers to include:
How many times did I swear?
How many times did I say the word “fuck”?
What was my total ratio swear words to non-swear words?
How many times did I say the word “equestrian”?
How many times did I have sex?
What was the best sex I had? Is there a tie? I think there's a tie, but I want to check.
What was the worst sex I had?
Overall, what was my enjoyment of sex compared to the all-time average of humanity's enjoyment of sex?
How many cups of coffee did I drink?
How many times was I fooled?
How many total standard drinks of alcohol did I consume?
How much did I sleep? How much of it was good?
For my lifetime, what was my average bedtime?
Overall, on balance, was my presence on Earth harmful or not harmful?
Was I a good person?
Would trying harder have helped? (Some questions may get you warm shrugs from the operators in the room, but others they can put right up there on the screen and it's like “Whoa.”)
Of the people who didn't care much for me, who did I care for the most?
Of the people I never cared much for, who cared for me the most?
Would there have been a way to introduce them to each other and have them compare notes?
And you can see it right there in front of you, all in numbers and charts and graphs, as much as you could ever want to know.
You can spend hours or days quantifying and marvelling and having a bit of a giggle sometimes at this vast sum of information. Information with seemingly limitless permutations. Information that can no longer be applied. It's simply there to look at. And once that permissible piece of sadness lands in you, you can smile a little at your life, at all of its numbers and how they weren't quite like anyone else's (Or were they? Can you please bring up the person with stats, on the whole, most similar to mine?), and then you put it away and go back into the first room and watch seasons one-through-seven of Firefly again.
Then you leave the first room and go through the second room, out into the afterlife at large, and someone hands you a cup of coffee as you pass by. Out in the afterlife everyone is there so you try to find your friends. However the Afterlife is a big place and there's no Facebook so it takes a while. But it's okay, you've got time.

Gorgeous, simple and whimsically simplistically gorgeous.

This is wonderful. I wish I had written it. But I guess I did if we are all "one"...no?

I loved the balance of humour and heart.

Really, really enjoyed reading this.

This is beautiful!
I want this afterlife!