Laughter and death
Friends and relatives who have known me forever will tell you that I always laugh out loud. Some people say the way I laugh is not ladylike but I don’t care. I love laughter. I just watch The Big Bang Theory and get my laughter quota for the day, even if they are re-runs. The show is still very funny.
My friends and relatives will also tell you they think I’m obsessed with death because I look forward to my death. I am not obsessed with death. I am just tremendously curious about it, about the experience and the afterlife. What does it feel like to die? That’s a question that often creeps into my mind as I’m playing computer solitaire or making jewelry. Once a friend who was clinically dead then revived told me it was like she had a thousand orgasms. Whoa, I thought, that looks like the way to go. I look forward even to one-tenth of that. I can hardly wait. But others argue that the death experience will be unique to you. They claim, there is no single formula for death as there is no single formula for having a baby. What’s the connection? There are only two dates we have absolutely no control over – our date of birth and our date of death. Those two dates are totally up to God.
So why am I so curious about death? Because I think it’s the next best thing scheduled to happen to me. Please don’t try to tell me I could fall in love because I’ve been there, done that, a thousand times. No, thank you, that’s not exciting anymore. It’s more exciting to knit a difficult pattern than to fall in love.
Sometimes I wonder — what if at the moment of my death here on earth I am being born as a baby on Venus or Mars? There is no life on Venus or Mars, one of my friends says. No life that can be photographed by our equipment and made visible to us, I argue. What if there is life only we can’t see it? This curiosity isn’t killing this cat but it’s fueling my imagination.
Anyway I was having lunch with my daughter and decided to pass by a bookstore and look at the tarot cards. I know the Catholic Church does not approve of tarot cards, for the simple reason that it ante-dated them. They managed to work themselves around the solstices — like the winter solstice became Christmas — but they couldn’t work themselves around the tarot cards so they banned them. Work of the devil, they said. Let’s not argue that. Let’s just agree to disagree.
These days there seems to be an onrush of new tarot cards. They have Vampire Tarot cards. I don’t like vampires. I like the Osho cards because they are different from the standard and they make a lot of sense to me. Osho is an Indian gentleman from India who has given talks internationally on everything from the individual’s quest for meaning to whatever is facing society today. He has very innovative visions that you can appreciate in all of his cards.
Browsing through the tarot cards and getting amazed at the number of new themes I saw Osho Transformation Tarot and without scanning or reading the box beyond 60 Illustrated Cards and Book for Insight and Renewal I bought them. Each card tells a story that you can take whichever way you want. This morning I tried it for the first time. I drew the card titled Laughter. It told the story of three Chinese friends who just laughed their way through life. They traveled across China making people (who mostly only cared about money and material things) laugh. One day one of them died. The remaining two still laughed and danced. People got upset saying, When a man is dead it is profane to laugh and dance.
They said, We laughed with him all the time he was alive. How can we send him off with anything else? We have to laugh, to enjoy, to celebrate. This is the only possible farewell for a man who laughed his whole life. We don’t see that he’s dead. How can laughter die? How can life die? He told us not to perform any rituals, change his clothes and or give him a bath. He told us to just put him on the burning pyre. We have to follow his instructions.
When they put his body on the pyre, the dead man played his last trick. He had hidden many fireworks under his clothes and suddenly there was a festival. Then the whole village started laughing and dancing. It was not a death, it was a new life.
That’s a beautiful thought! I hope you understand me better now. I am not obsessed with death. I am just so curious about the new life.
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