Where do we go when we die? This is the question most of us get to consider. What brings this to mind is that this is my mother’s birthday. If she were still alive, she’d be 95 years or thereabouts. Close enough, math wise. Ninety-five – she might actually still be alive. She died at 84.

I was about five when I realized that we all died. I was terrified by this realization. Both of my grandfathers were there one day, and then gone the next. Much loved pets had also died. Knowing you are going to die isn’t anything that you ever get used to. Rather, you spend your life wondering three things. The first one is, how are you going to die? And the second is when are you going to die, and the third is, where do you go when you die?

When I was 11 or so, I went through a phase of really fearing death. This may have been because a classmate died, and the grandfather of a classmate died. When someone dies in the Catholic faith, they make a really big deal about it. I think I had to go to both funerals. There was the casket, and the mass, and people weeping.

Alys's mom

Where did they go? I was told by my mother that good people go to heaven and that bad people go to hell. I couldn’t imagine either. It was hard for me to get past the thought of what became of my bodily self when I died. I further developed a fear of being buried alive. I’d read in the National Inquirer about a person who had the same fear I did. They ended up wiring an external bell to his coffin. Presumably, when he pulled on a wire, the bell would ring.

I liked this idea, and was told (I think to shut me up) that I’d get a bell and wire set up when I died. Never mind that I most likely I would have been embalmed and therefore would not wake up. And never mind that there isn’t much oxygen in a coffin (although this could be remedied by putting a bottle of oxygen and a breathing apparatus in with the deceased), and never mind that most likely the odds of someone hearing the bell, particularly at night, were slim. The fact of the matter is that this put to rest (no pun intended) my immediate fears of being buried alive.

I didn’t have fears of being cremated because Catholics do not cremate their loved ones. Now though, I find that I am as averse to this as I am to being buried. I suspect that your spirit hangs out after you die and takes in what becomes of you.

I have come up with a solution, one that puts my still eleven-year-old mind to rest. I would like to be composted. I think this is legal in Vermont, where everything good is legal. So I may have to move there.

Becoming one with the bugs. This is most fitting to me, one who spends so much time in the woods.

Next: 148. 5/29/24: Transitions