Let me tell you something: being dead sucks. No, really, it is the worst. I mean, sure, you might immediately think I’m talking about losing the “pleasures of the flesh” and all that. Yeah, that gets to you, but six months in – tops – you’re over it. No, it’s the whole existential thing – you’re no longer there. Poof. Gone.

The first couple months are the worst of the worst. Let’s say you died a normal death – you know, maybe long battle with cancer, or a heart attack, or you stepped out in front of a bus. Run of the mill death. Those first couple months you’re all about “I’m not there!” That’s literally all you’re going to think about. And that’s the rub – those who are like, “Whoa, I’m dead… okay, I’m dead.” They’ll pass on. They’re the lucky ones. But if you really cared? I mean, if you just can’t let go of it? If you’re more like, “Okay, I’m dead, but I am not okay with this!” Yeah, buddy, then you’re gonna stick around. And it sucks to be you. Take it from me.

Cancer. Started as… it doesn’t matter where it started. Where it ended was my liver. Liver went, lights out. But I wasn’t ready. It was a war, man, you know? “I will conquer this!” “I’ll beat this!” “It won’t beat me!” Ha! After I died I was in serious denial – how could I “lose”? Lose! That’s a laugh – but that’s a laugh I can have now. Now I know it wasn’t a thing to be won or lost. It was a matter of chance. A clump of cells went rogue for some reason. You can point the blame wherever – did I smoke? A bit. Ate exclusively rabbit food? Are you kidding? Maybe I stood too close to the gas pump when I was filling my Chevy. Maybe they used some shit chemical in the upholstery of that same Chevy. Blame. It don’t get you nowhere. And you want to know the real kicker there? Check this out: you will never find out. Ha ha ha ha! I can’t tell you how many people I meet when they come across who are like, “I’m dead, okay, so tell me why?” I tell them the same thing: “I got no answer for you, buddy.” Ha ha ha, you should see their faces! It’s the shits, man! If you didn’t find the answers you were looking for when you were an air-breather, it ain’t gonna make any more sense over here. But you won’t find that our until it’s too late..

But I digress…

Those poor suckers who hang on to the living world too much, those first couple months all you’re going to focus on is who you left behind. My wife… yeah, I sat on the foot of her bed for the first month. Visited my boys, too, sure, but Eleanor… When I died, she broke. Just broke, man. Me too, of course, but like I said, I’m here. So, yeah, I haunted her and my boys… and I couldn’t do anything.

Oh, I hear you, what about all those stories about ghosts appearing. This ain’t no Patrick Swayze bullshit. Okay, so, yeah, if you try really, really, really hard you can maybe rattle a chain or knock on a wall. But like fully appear? It’s possible, sure. But… let me put this in perspective: rattling a chain is about as easy as lifting a Buick. Can you do it? Yeah, if you’re really strong, super determined, some super-human strength kinda thing – not normal, right? But, yeah, it can – and has – been done. But like full apparition? Like lifting a bus. Pshaw. Good luck to you. And, yeah, it’s true what they say about the “veil being thinner” nearer Halloween. But that just means that Chevy you have to lift isn’t full of gas; it’s still a goddamned Chevy.

To recap: you’re haunting your loved ones. They can’t see you. You can’t touch them. Y’all can’t communicate in any way, shape, or form. But you can still see them – eating, sleeping, crying, laughing, singing, loving… After those first couple of months when they’ve started to move on, started to get used to the idea that you’re not there… Man, that kills you. And you’re already dead, so, you know, double death or something. What do you do? A lot of guys, it drives them freakin’ nuts. Seriously – you’ll see them around dead-eyed – heh, that’s kinda funny, dead-eyed – but it’s an apt description. You’ll see. There’s nothing to ‘em anymore. And that’s what they’re gonna do until… fuck knows – the sun burns out? The Universe cools? I don’t know.

Me? Yeah… well, shit… after two months I couldn’t do it anymore. I left. I mean, you know, you’re dead. You can go anywhere – that’s what a lot of folks on this side forget about. So, I traveled. Saw the pyramids. Antarctica. Walked the streets of Tokyo. I even walked the sea-bed looking for the goddamn Loch Ness Monster (didn’t find him). But this is the curse there, too – you learn that the reason why you traveled when you were alive was to feel the hot, fine sand of the Sahara, to know the unspeakable cold at the bottom of the world, to eat the best fucking sushi in your life in some back-alley stall in Tsukiji fish market. After a while – and for me it took another two years – you realize seeing these places you didn’t get to go to when you were alive is just another form of torture.

And I did go back to my family from time to time. Usually around the anniversary of my death, but it was so fucking sad. Everyone was sad. That day sucks, there is nothing redeeming about it. I’d go to my grave, see if anyone’s been there. I’d go check in on my friends, see what they’re getting up to. But it’s that same thing – you’re dead, they’ve moved on, yada, yada, yada. It could drive a guy to drink if, you know, you could drink (spoiler: you can’t). So then what? Travel again maybe, lather, rinse repeat…

Are you getting the impression that it’s not exactly unicorns and kittens being dead? Yeah, like I said, it sucks. But I’ll tell you something: I have no idea what the dead did before the internet. Seriously, I already said you can’t do much more than knock on a wall – you want to knock a book off the shelf at the library? Good luck! And how do you plan to turn the pages? Uh-huh. Sucks, right? No, with the internet we can just slip into the information stream – boom! Everything out there is at your command. I can speak six languages now! I can definitively tell you what the best LOLCAT meme is. And I can recite 80% of Bob Dylan’s catalog – except for that shit-period in the eighties? Yeah, who wants to put mental energy towards that? So, you know, all that’s a lovely diversion. But you learn that, too, is like some cursed version of “Groundhog Day” because while Bill Murray is learning new things every day, the world resets and starts over with that lousy Sonny and Cher song, but for us? … I can speak Sanskrit but I can’t show my son how to tie a tie for his first Homecoming dance. Another torture.

So why do I seem so together if everything after death is a shit-show? Yeah, that’s a great question. Hanging on to your family won’t get you anywhere. Traveling won’t get you anywhere (figuratively speaking, right?). And hanging out in the internet won’t get you anywhere. When I realized all that I ended up sitting on a rock at the end of a jetty in Santa Cruz harbor a lot, just watching the waves for months at a time. No, I wasn’t one of those dead-eyed motherfuckers. I was still whole, just thinking. Trying to accept. Trying to shift my mental reality.

Then something happened. I’d always stayed the hell away from anyone or anything I knew around my birthday. It was bad enough when I was around for the anniversary of my death – I did not need to see… well, I didn’t need to see that I wasn’t there to celebrate another birthday. But one day I went back. It was… five years out. The fifth birthday I missed. I went back to my family. And you know what? They were all together. My oldest came home from college for the day, my youngest skipped basketball practice. Eleanor took them both out to Frankie’s – that was my place, man. They got a four-top table right in the back like we used to do. Yeah, I took the fourth seat – they didn’t know. They couldn’t see me, I couldn’t make a sound… But… I’ll tell you what… they talked about me. They laughed. They told stories about how I would reach back and try to grab the boys when they were terrible on road trips. They laughed about the food fight we had that one Thanksgiving. Eleanor talked about when we were first dating and had too much to drink and threw up on me. About how I had to have tinsel on the Christmas tree and the boys to this day despise tinsel because of it. Ha! I realized then that, yeah, they had moved on. Eleanor was even dating this guy – nice guy, don’t get me wrong. And the boys – like I said, one in college, the other about to graduate – they were different men from the boys I left. But there at that table, five years after I was gone… they brought me back to life. On my birthday, five years after my heart stopped I realized that as long as they tell these stories? I’ll never really be dead.