If This Is The Edge, What's After It?

Carry On/The Cliff

At the end of life,
Everything has to die.
The eternal blackness, the unknown, terrifying void on the edge of his world,
That all must return to at some point.
That's what death is.
We're all scared of it,
Powerless to stop our descent into the dark.
But maybe it's not something to be feared.

It's strange, really.
Because however hard we split ourselves up, divide the world into ever increasing boxes and labels,
There is one thing that unites all of us,
And that is in fact death.
We are all destined, along with all life, and even the universe itself,
To leave this world, and maybe go into a eternal state of nothingness,
Or emerge into a new earth,
Or go to some form of heaven or hell.
We don't know what's after this strange world, the life of the absurd we've been born into,
But dying allows us to say we have been alive.

When someone leaves this world,
The petty arguments of families, friends and even nations fall away,
As people unite against this one seemingly common enemy.
Even in the Cold War, Khrushchev gave up his ego to help the West,
When Kennedy was assassinated,
And on a smaller scale,
Communities and families seem to come together in tribute after someone dies.
It's strange, how humanity bonds in the powerlessness over its own fate,
That seems to be a silver lining to death, if you can even say it has one.

For life to happen, for happiness, for peace and for love,
Something will have to fall away.
We all will fall away, someday, at least physically.
However, we will never be gone entirely.
Our memories will live on in our descendants, hopefully positive ones.
Our genetics will at least in some form live on in all future life forms of this world,
As all life is connected,
And eventually,
Even after the destruction of the world,
Perhaps the atoms that made up our bodies, the things that made up a human,
Will find its way onto a new world,
And into a new being aware of its own existence and mortality,
Or maybe it'll end up in a new universe,
Or our souls will live on in some alternate dimension.
We don't know what's over the cliff edge, into the cold abyss of death.
But we will all be destined to find out.
Because death is the one thing that unites us,
And that might be the most human thing in this whole universe,
To be together in the thing that ends us.
Of course, I don't know what's after this,
But I suppose we must try and be grateful for it,
As eventually, we will go over the edge,
And find out what's in the great beyond.
And maybe we'll look back and smile a bit at our time on that little island in a cold sea called Earth,
As dying proved we had lived.

('Since we have been born, we have learned a lot. As we get closer to death, we forget a lot, as we realise we are already ashes.' Taka Moriuchi, Deeper Deeper, 'The web of life, love, suffering and death unites all beings.' Alex Grey)