Do you know what happens when you die?

I asked my grandfather once and he told me. I remember the day on his farm. He was running late and I waited for him with two cans of Coca-Cola… One for me and one for him. Every minute I waited the warmer they got. Finally I saw him slowly walking over the hill, I guess his age was really showing.

I know he knew about death because he had died before. During the war he had been impaled by a Union soldier’s bayonet. His heart had stopped and he saw death, he saw the after life, he knew the answers.

When he was dead he told me he woke up on a dirt path outside his childhood home. He could see the silhouette of his mother in the window, casting a shadow as the afternoon sun poured through the house.

He told me he could feel the air on his skin and could smell the flowers in bloom. It was perfectly recreated – every second of that memory. As he continued to walk down the path he remembered what should happen next. He’d look across Parnett’s paddock to the east and see his father coming back to the house. He’d walk up to my grandfather and hug him and scruff his hair before heading inside.

Except when he was dead it didn’t happen. When he was dead his father was just a shadow in the distance, unrecognizable and empty. Walking in space forever, never getting any closer.

My grandfather told me he stood there for hours watching his father’s silhouette silently walk in place. And then he cried. He wasn’t ashamed to tell me he cried either. He let me know how empty he felt, how an unnatural depression engulfed him. How he felt sick, like a flu had taken over his body and he began to shiver.

Then, he looked to the sky and prayed to God and the sky opened and with it his eyes opened. And he didn’t see God, but instead he saw a nurse and then he felt pain and he screamed. She told him he had been stabbed but he was OK. She said he had no pulse for many minutes, and to keep his eyes open and fight through the pain.

I remember him telling me all of this. And then he told me that was the day he knew God didn’t exist. There was no Heaven. Death was just an infinite alone, a memory on repeat without any external life. He told me to fear death, because even in the 5 minutes he was there it had been constant pain. He said death was Hell.

I remember all of this so vividly and today I’m planning on asking him for more details. He’s late again though. Oh! but I can see him now, he’s walking over the horizon. I can see his silhouette in the afternoon sun. But he’s just walking so slowly.