Getting over that thing called death

I am not afraid of death. I got over that when I was about 10 years old. It is not that I want to die but I kind of figured out that it is not only inevitable but perhaps not such a terrible thing.

It all happened when I was a kid and this thing about death got into my head. How does death make any sense? How can you die, leaving your family, friends and everybody behind? It just did not make any sense in my small little mind.

I lost sleep over it day after day. I spent many nights trying to figure out how it worked. How can you simply move on into another world with no promise of coming back? Perhaps it is not your choice but it seemed unfair.

Fortunately, over time, I put things into perspective: We do pass on but only for a time.

What happens is you die, go to another place and wait for your chance to come back. Even in heaven, there has to be such a thing as population control and it cannot keep taking in people.

So what happens, I figured, is that it keeps sending you back, just not always as a human being. After all, we are not all human beings on Earth.

What must be, I decided, is that you would take a ticket ― like you do when you go to a bank ― and wait for your turn and find out what you are going to go back as.

On one occasion, they will ask you to go back as a mosquito, on another as a fruit fly. You don’t really have a choice but the good thing is that you get to come back really quick and take another number.

One of the better options would be a dog, in which case you may be lucky enough to live as a pet ― it would be about 17 or 18 years of very leisurely life with no work except for barking at passers-by and playing patsy to your owners and their children.

In the end, you will come back as a human being. You will be a completely different person but who cares ― in the book of human beings, the best thing is to be a human.

This is actually quite tricky. There are all kinds of different human beings on the planet and you have to be careful about what you come back as, especially since it happens only once in a lifetime.

This is the good thing about it. I tend to have lived most of my life as a “decent” human being ― I really don’t mean to be the judge of that _ making all sorts of efforts not to cause harm to other people, because I know what happens in the afterlife.

The interesting thing is that I sleep so well at night. It has been like that most of my life, after I took care of the death stuff. As some people say, I sleep like a dog.

It is a mind thing. Once I figured out what happens after life, it seemed to make all the sense in the world. And I no longer lived in fear that I will one day die, leaving everyone behind, with no hope of ever seeing them again.

I have a beautiful wife and two wonderful daughters and I cannot imagine leaving them behind. It would, in fact, kill me.

But I have a feeling that if I live my life truthfully and without causing harm to other people, no harm would come to them even in my absence.

And if there is a God, I believe he will bring us back together, in one form or another. Just maybe, this is what is happening now. <The Korea Times/Jake J. Nho>

*Jake J. Nho heads online operations at The Korea Times. He has been a journalist and a marketing executive for the past 27 years. He can be reached at jakenho@hotmail.com.

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