Carol Reid writes about...

Afterlives

Challenge 258 asked, in part: How does Mary B. McArdle’s “Afterlife” differ from Arash Farzaneh’s “The Heavenly Twins” in its view of death?

“Afterlife” depicts a heaven of familiar pleasures, reunions with departed loved ones and remembered objects of affection and a return of the physical vitality of youth. In “Heavenly Twins,” non-corporeal life is referred to as “beautiful beyond imagination,” presumably so unlike this life as to be indescribable in earthly terms. This makes me wonder why the twins (who brought to mind the myth of Castor and Pollux) came to Earth at all.

Carol Reid

You’ve summed it up quite succinctly, Carol.

“Afterlife” is full of life as we know it. “The Heavenly Twins” suggests that death is better than life in a mystical way.

The poem and story thus present two sides of the same coin: on one side we have “the afterlife is more of the same, but idealized”; on the other side we have “the afterlife is something completely different and incomprehensible.”

“The Heavenly Twins” also opens the question of assisted suicide or euthanasia. If it’s possible to know that death offers something better than imprisonment in an immobile body, how does one define “immobile”? Where does one draw the line: at extreme incapacity or mere boredom? As you say, if the afterlife is better, why bother with this one?

In the story, John communicates his wishes to Eric by telepathy, which makes a decision very easy. And Eric apparently follows his brother John into a spiritual realm, which rather too easily disposes of the ethical problems that people unlike the twins — namely the rest of humanity — have to deal with.

In the end, visions of an afterlife have much more to do with the way one views this life than with anything else.

Don