What Happens When We Die (487 words)

Sometimes the comedian Stephen Colbert finished interviews on his show by asking celebrities what they think happens when we die. Keanu Reeves gave a particularly touching answer.

We try not to think about it, don’t think about it for years at a stretch sometimes, and yet it is the central preoccupation of our species. We’ve come up with a lot of theories about the Big Unknowable, but I think all of our hopes and beliefs about the afterlife—the Good Place/Bad Place carrot and stick; the idea that we keep incarnating over and over; even some people’s insistence that nothing happens (“NOTHING!” they bellow, with the same zealous certainty as any fundamentalist)—all of these theories, all of our stories and mythologies, are the crudest approximations for what it is. They must be.

Any theory we come up with, any story we tell, flows inescapably from the substance of this human existence. Our spacesuits, these bodies, are so radically limited, our sensory inputs so curtailed. We see, but not all the light; we hear, but not the full range of sound; we touch, but there is so much we cannot feel. Our experience of time as a linear sequence of events with a beginning and an end—is that how time works? Or rather, is that the only way time works? And let’s not even start on the poor and fragmentary nature of the languages we use to describe this life. This afterlife.

No, none of it comes close to hitting the mark, I suspect. And that’s perfectly fine. People talk about surrendering, often in relation to a spiritual catharsis—being born again, say, or in a secular sense of letting go of the ego, however one wants to describe it—the big surrender might just be about not feeling afraid or frustrated by the absolute unknowability of the second great change of the two great changes that bookend our lives.

I am a mother, and before I had my son, I could not have imagined what the ninth month of pregnancy feels like. For any woman who has not given birth, and for all men, it is impossible to conceive of what it feels like to be hugely pregnant, with a full-grown baby inside your body.

But when you get there, it is exactly what you would have imagined it to feel like, if you could have been capable of imagining it. Which you couldn’t have, not really. It feels as natural and normal to be massive, with that independent person rolling around in there, as any other physical experience in life. And I think death, which follows birth inevitably as nature, dawn following dusk, must be the same way. When we get there, it’s—of course. Of course this is it, freed from our spacesuit bodies. We were afraid, we were heartbroken to say goodbye. But of course this is what it is. How natural. How normal.