Of Death And After

Death is one of those cans of worms that people actively go out of their way to avoid discussing. Talk to one person and they tell you that heaven or hell waits for you, another tells you that you never die, you are simply reincarnated, yet another tells you that there simply is nothing after death.

Point being that thinking of something imaginative for what happens after death was actually quite fun. Personally, I’m a fan of the eternal darkness theory, but that’s what I think, not what I write.

Note: If you haven’t read Alone Together yet, I would suggest that you do so before continuing.

Are they gone yet?

Good.

The point in this blog is a bit of expansion in terms of I might use it for my own stories later on or people can build off of this idea if they so choose. It’s not just complete ass-sniffery.

Anyway… the idea in Alone Together, as it essentially boils down to, is that there is no particular afterlife, everyone simply lives on as ghosts in the world they left behind. The catch is that they can’t be seen by those still living or those that are dead. You are literally Alone Together. You can be the judge of how clever I thought I was being when the title was brought up.

They can’t interact with the outside world unless they’re really practiced or strong, and even then, it would take raw emotion to force a change on the world and to cross the boundary between ghost and the living. Truly skilled and/or strong people would be able to change whatever they want to. Whether it be the position of a book or the patterns of the weather.

Now… in a world of that, after a few millennia, no house would remain free of moving ghosts that disturbed the peace and kept everyone on their toes, so there has to be a catch… this isn’t a life of eternal peace and apathy. Dying takes something away from you… it takes away the value that life had to you, and with it, it starts to strip you away from yourself. Your memories, your values and your interests will all go away in time, stripped away to the passage of the clock.

But that takes hundreds of years, maybe longer dependant on how hard someone is holding onto their self. It’s just there, stripping away the bits and pieces that are there for the taking. People can remember small things about themselves… think of it as Alzheimer’s; something that can still have momentary lapses even as the rest of the memories are simply lost into a fog.

And even the old ones can have an effect on the living. Think of the slightest breeze that you pass through when walking. That would be them… wisps on the air, no more substantial than that. It’s probably just as well too.

They see the world yet cannot interact with it in any great form, and to see it change around them; to watch their homes being torn down, rebuilt or abandoned without being able to do anything to save it… that’s a certain kind of special torture for those that still have the power to remember just how important it was to them. Lost spirits aren’t those that inhibit this realm, they are those that inhibit it and have lost what little had tied them to the mortal world in the first place.

Truly lost spirits, the ones that simply float along in the breeze, are those that have been completely forgotten. Over time, records of their existence, whether it was birth certificates, marriage certificates or death certificates, get lost and torn and destroyed. The records of that person influence how closely they have a hold on their own existence in this new realm. Someone with no record of their existence is extremely unlikely to be able to consciously influence another’s.

It’s why haunted houses are always mansions. The owners were filthy rich and had records, if only for their own benefit, hanging around them about their younger days. Someone walks into their house, their house, that they wish to remain their own, and they get angry. Someone has disturbed their peace and they’re invading their space with the giant portrait of them, the numerous ledgers and newspaper articles about them. They’re probably strong enough to cause quite a large racket.

This works for the current timeframe of Equestria since there is no data storage to speak of above archives. Newspapers are not written up into the web for billions of people to see them at once and to be stored there until the servers get a spring cleaning. Papers are much more likely to age and eventually disintegrate than server storage is.

I think that’s concise enough of an explanation of how this particular afterlife works without getting too philosophical and keeping it linked to the general story. If there’s something that I’ve neglected to explain about this theory then feel free to ask.

Comments

[Willsons]

It's certainly a interesting theory if not a slightly depressing one.

It's nice to read something that takes a good and serious look at the afterlife in a nonreligious way. It is quite hard for me to rap my head around any form of afterlife with just how many people die, in my mind there could never be enough room.

Death to me is death. The end, the total end. Nothing more after it, just death. It's why religion has no interest for me, they all talk about something after death.