Life after Death

Death is often a taboo topic, atleast to me. A topic that I avoid reading about, talking about and even thinking about. It is morbid. Depressing. In every way. Until I started reading this book called “elsewhere” by “Gabrielle Zevin”. I started this book with lot of scepticism; almost sure that I won’t like it. But pretty soon I changed my opinion. Gabrielle transformed “death” into a fascinating story.

There are two aspects of “death”; one is “loosing someone” and the other is “your own death”. By all means, the first one is most remorsefull that fills you with grief and only grief; nothing but sadness. However, the second one, “death of oneself” is a very intriguing, emotional, scary and fictions concept. I am not talking about suicidal tendencies and that sort. I am talking about natural death – what happens after we die? Do we exist? Do we have any association with the living ones? Do we dissipate into energy and spread in the universe? Or do we have a life after death ? Do we get born again? Nobody knows what happens. All that people do is that theorize about it. It is an eternal topic that every religion tries to address in their own way.

Death makes God a reality! Death makes life a mystery! Death makes the this world insignificant.

In this book, Gabrielle Zevin portrayed life after death in a fascinating way. She talks about a girl Liz who dies prematurely at the age of 15. After she dies, she reaches this place called “elsewhere” which is almost like earth, yet completely different from it. Here in “elsewhere”, everybody ages backward from the day of their death until they become a baby again, when they return back to Earth. Life after Death in “elsewhere” is life aging backward. It is like living with older people journeying backward in age who intersect with your timeline and start aging with you. Interesting concept! Liz finds her grandmother here who has aged backward and almost looks like her mother. Everybody work here but they choose a profession that they like and spend time doing something that they enjoy – it is called avocation. Quoting from the book – “An Avocation is not a job. A job has to do with prestige! Money! An avocation is something a person does to make his or her soul complete!” How we wish that that was the case in earth – we all have an avocation and not a job! Initially, Liz is sad, she wants to age forward, become 16, drive a car, graduate from high school, go to college, fall in love and enjoy life. But she finds herself dead and in “elsewhere” where can not do any of those things. Time is ticking for her. Backwards. Eventually, she adjusts to this new life, makes new friends and accepts her backward advancing life.

It is a novel idea, the idea of living backward. In this backward journey, if people fall sick,they recover from it automatically as and when they grow younger. Sick become healthy. Old become young. You get a second chance to do things, the right way. Experience things in life that you missed out in your forward journey of life.

The author gives a meta-physical definition of human existence. It is perceived as being like a circle and a line at the same time. It is a circle, because everything that was old would be new and everything that was new became old. It is a line because the circle stretches out indefinitely, and the line progresses infinitely. People die; get born; die again and the cycle continues. Each birth and death is a little circle, and the sum of all those little circles is the life and it advances in a line.

This book changed my outlook about “death”. I feel that there is no reason to think so morbid about our own death. Maybe “life after death” would be more interesting than “life” itself!

Or maybe not! We will never know!