What about death?

‘Where will I go when I die?’ Casserole Blunts’ question stopped the flow of conversation in the pub, momentarily. Apart from the complexity of the philosophical and theological issues entwined in the question, the thought of dying was as welcome as a stone in your shoe when you have nowhere to sit and shake it out.

Dying is not the top topic for conversation in what is meant to be a quiet hour relaxing in the pub, free from thoughts of work, wives and hard-Brexit blues.

It was early Friday night. The Catholic curate from Redditch had dropped in for his free half pint of shandy and to collect any offerings from the donation box on the bar. Being a man of the collar, he sees death as a key part of life. When he broke off his conversation to answer Casserole’s question, the two men he had trapped in the corner by the fire escaped to the toilet without having to offer an apology.

‘A challenging question’, he started. We didn’t think so. Casserole never asked a challenging question apart from the time he asked his mother, ‘could you even guess which of the four is my father?’

Priests see challenge and complexity in the simplest of issues. This one couldn’t leave it alone. ‘The problem is with the words “I”, “go” and “where”,’ he said.

He never mentioned the word “die’ so maybe he thought that was straightforward.

‘As I see it,’ he pontificated, ‘the difficult word is “where” when you are talking about eternity.’

No one had mentioned eternity so he was heading down the wrong path.

‘By definition the “where” cannot be a place. God does not exist in a place so it cannot be an actual location because God is not composed of matter, hence we cannot “go” there because there isn't a place to go to.’

Spreader Ashborne, forgetting the pub rule about not encouraging bores and idiots by asking them questions, butted in. ‘I thought God exists everywhere and here is part of everywhere. Here is solid and real so if God exists here doesn’t that mean he exists in a place and we can go to that place?’

The priest smiled, ‘you don’t understand. You are mingling several layers of thought in your rather loose use of language.’ Priests deal with anyone disagreeing with their daft ideas by using a smile and a subtle “you don’t understand” put down. It doesn’t seem insulting, unless you think about it. Why would you waste time thinking about it in a pub on a Friday night?

Undeterred by our genuine disinterest and the look of boredom in our faces as we tried to avoid paying attention, he pressed on. ‘The more difficult concept is what is meant by the “I” in the question. Identifying the foundation of identity and the vexed question of the perpetuation of consciousness after death lies at the heart of our theories about the after life.’

Comments like that make you wonder when they stopped speaking in simple sentences.

He paused. When neither applause nor another reckless question was forthcoming, he smiled, spread his hands and said, ‘I rest my case.’

He finished his half pint, swept the foreign coins from the collection box into a plastic bag and left with a cheery good night. He still hadn’t answered Casserole’s question.

Plucky, the bar man, concentrated on pulling a series of pints before, unasked and with no encouragement from us, he gave his view on mortality. ‘Your religions, all of them, the mad ones as well as the daft and real ones, tell you we go somewhere after death to be blessed with a reward – something like peace, or free women, maybe not going to work, or watching the ones who were bad bastards on earth being flogged or burnt alive. Then there are those who say we are each part of the energy of the universe and at death we get sucked up again into that energy and we are made new – like taking loads of bottles to the recycling factory to be turned into new bottles. That sounds better than the ones who say we are turned into flies, frogs or trees.’

He paused to stare at the bar he had been rubbing with his diseased cloth as if thinking about going on to contaminate some glasses with his cloth, or possibly he was searching for another idea. ‘Nobody has been to an after life and come back. So all of them religions speculate, don’t they? I think we should work out what death is, because it changes your life when you think about it, rather than wondering where you go after it has happened.’

Scatter Soames rescued us from Plucky’s convoluted meanderings and cut to the heart of Casserole’s initial question. ‘Only two generations of your family have lived in the village, Casserole, so you will not be buried in the graveyard alongside the village church. You will go to the crematorium in Redditch when you die.’

Nobody attempted to work out what Plucky meant when he said that death changes your life when you think about it. We were more interested in discussing why all the bees in the Bluebottle Farm hives had died suddenly. Foreign bees or aliens would undoubtedly get the blame.