It dawns on me that my blog is like one very long epitaph, but, who better to write my story than me? Maybe people who tell me the things we share on the internet will live on forever as some strange binary message to be interpreted at some much later date are telling me the truth. If so, that's cool.
Speaking of epitaphs, my favorite is one by Dorothy Parker:
"She hated bleak and wintery things alone,
All that was warm and quick, she loved too well.
A light, a flame, a heart against her own,
It is forever bitter cold in hell."
The title of that is simply "Epitaph."
This is the same Dorothy Parker, who wrote: Razors pain you, Rivers are damp, (you know, the ode to suicide that ends, "you might as well live..."
I don't know what made Dorothy so ambivalent with regards to life and death. Maybe it was fear. She must have had a good Catholic upbringing. I'd like to think so. At least, if you're Catholic, you can confess at the last moment of your life (have candles lit for you and your sins), confess, be forgiven, and make it through the pearly gates provided you are honest in the end. But, if she was raised as a Southern Baptist, forget it. She knew she was a sinner and doomed from birth. I was raised that way, and have frequently thought that suicide is a more fitting end than any other for a sinner. "Shoot me now!" Have I not said that a thousand times during my life?
Anyone who has ever committed a mortal sin, whether Catholic, Baptist, Lutheran, or any other denomination has to wonder, what now? Does our spirit demand reparation when our soul departs? I have to wonder.
I think if we remain as ghosts, that's probably what the Catholic's refer to as Limbo. It's between places. I just hope they're wrong about babies and "unsaved" souls. That would be too cruel. Southern Baptists, on the other hand, are just all black and white about it. Babies and children before the "age of awareness" (or whatever they call it) are saved; all others, whether they've "heard the message of Jesus, or not," well they're just doomed.
When I learned this as a child, I was offended. How could God abandon any child who didn't have the opportunity to learn? To know about Jesus. This just sort of made me mad. No, this just made me mad, period.
Don't get me started on the Southern Baptist's take on the souls of animals, and whether or not they meet us in heaven.
Maybe that's when I lost it. Maybe, I started to read Mark Twain's "Letters From the Earth" and found a more compassionate and human view of Adam and Eve. And maybe I found in Mark Twain a better apostle than any I'd read about in the bible.
I would love to find redemption. I would love to find absolution. But I won't ever accept those things at "any cost." Like Mark Twain, if the only folks in heaven are sitting around on clouds, playing harps, badly, then, like him, maybe I belong elsewhere.
