Lights Out

The End of Everything You Knew

You're on your death bed. Family gathered around you to show you love and peace one more time, your grandkids holding your hands and reading you stories. Your daughter brushes your hair to make you feel pretty one last time, your son in law bringing you food. Well, it's supposed to be for you but you're too weak to feel even the slightest bit hungry so you encourage everyone else to eat. They need it more than you do anyway.

When you pass, after all the tears and grief and memorials, you find yourself...floating. No one mentioned that in the scriptures, any of them for that matter, but you don't particularly mind it. It's an absent-minded floating; you barely notice how much you drift in a day. Then again, who knows days here? It's an endless grey room of your life's moments and pictures. The day you learned to ride a bike. Your sixteenth birthday when your day blew out your candles when you turned away to joke with you. Your first crush, kiss, and love all in one. Your wedding day to said crush, and the resulting children; that memory made you blush a tad, on the inside at least. 

But when you get to the end, watching yourself wither on your bed, you see something you didn't before. Standing by your bed is a relative, a great aunt or great grandmother perhaps, that hadn't been there when you could only see with human eyes. She kissed your forehead and gently ran her hand across your cheek. You can't remember it at all but you watch as you take your last breath. The pictures stutter like old film and then there's just nothing. Now the floating feels boring. Maybe this is what purgatory really feels like.

You see a light forming. A soft yellow hue envelops your cold body and you think, "Wow, they were right. We really do reincarnate." But that's where you're wrong, friend. When you die, you aren't given new life, that's not quite how things work. Instead, there's other 'rooms', like the one you floated in to see your life replayed. Some are sweet, like old memories you can be a part of once again. But others...well, let's say even the Devil would be scared to enter one. But you don't know which one you will get, everything is random just like the grand scheme of things.

So, off you float room to room. You get to play with your old toys again, drive your first car for the first time again. Cook dinner with your mother in your first house. And then things get a little darker. The first time you got hurt, a nail gun went off into your wrist. And the first time you were harassed by a man bigger, stronger, and older than you. You were ten in that memory. One by one your childhood nightmares appear, each one worst than the last as you grew up. Eventually they evolved to terror of your family and friends dying in horrific and sometimes bloody ways.

Why go through all this, you ask? Well, when you die it takes your brain up to seven minutes to fully lose function. In those seven minutes your brain plays back everything you've seen, experienced, or dreamt. But it doesn't feel like seven minutes to you, does it. It feels like another lifetime come to pass, this one more terrifying than your original. But it can't get much worse than this, can it? 

Wait until you see your real afterlife. You'll love it...promise.