christine and i got to talking about eternity again. i remember my first experience with the idea of death. i don't remember how old i was, but i must have been very young. i think it was around christmas, because there were those little trains that i used to play with that only came out in mid-december, but that could just be a crossed wire in memory somewhere. patty says i was a very talkative child, learning to converse and read and all of that very, very early. this was before they tried to get me into any specific theology, though i had been baptized catholic. a lot of good that did.

anyway, it's just this incredibly vague memory, a child with his mother, christmas tree or maybe not, talking about god. she seemed willing to let all those years of uncertainty repressed by catholic doctrine out. "i don't know," she said. i don't know. that's the part that stuck out. i think a lot of my relationship with my parents over the years has been shaped by the understanding between us that they don't necessarily know best. i've been allowed to make my own mistakes, and i think they must feel their hands-off approach paid off, because i turned out to be the good kid, the one with free reign who uses it to sit around reading.

back to eternity. christmas tree? still not sure. so we were talking about death. there i am, maybe a few years old, first child of a relatively successful middle class family, considering what it means to no longer be here. at all. nothingness. i asked her what it all meant, she said she didn't know. then i proposed a scenario, and i remember this part distinctly. what if two people were good friends, and one of them died before the other and went to heaven? couldn't he come back for a little while and tell the other guy what it's like?

"no one has ever done that."

so there it was, what everyone has been puzzling over since the beginning. in later years, as i imagine many others have, i'd lie paralyzed in bed, terrified of death. there was this recurring vision of the earth fading in the distance and then an unexplainable nothingness. a very scary unexplainable nothingness.

do yourself a favour and contemplate some of this at some point. say your name over and over again until it doesn't mean anything.