After Death
It might be a bit too early to discuss this topic now.
But I don’t mind—it’s a very interesting question.
Recently, I’ve been reading some news about funerals, and I was surprised that France still uses coffins. The ceremonies are incredibly solemn. Coffins feel quite unfamiliar to me, because where I’m from, urns seem to be more common.
Then I started imagining what should happen to me after I die.
I don’t want to be buried in the ground. I feel that once a person dies, the soul has already left the body and completely moved beyond the scale of the living. So the destination shouldn’t just be another place on the same ground where the body spent its whole life. Although I’m a materialist and don’t believe in religion, I still feel that at the moment of death, the soul leaves the body. Whether it reincarnates or just becomes a free-floating spirit—that’s up to individual imagination. From a biological perspective, the moment the heart stops beating is death, and after death, there is nothing left. Even if a soul were to drift around, there would be no consciousness. From a social perspective, if your work lives on and you are remembered, then in a way, you’re not truly dead.
Also, in Chinese there’s a euphemism for death: “去世”, which is equivalent to “die” or “pass away.”
The first time I heard this word, I didn’t understand why death would be described as “去世.” Its literal meaning is “to go to the world,” so why would dying be expressed that way? For Asians, aren’t Europe and America also part of “the world”? And for Europeans, aren’t Asia and America also “the world”?
But at the time, I somehow felt that the word “去世” suggested leaving the ground and rising upward, flying to a higher place. By contrast, traveling from Asia to Europe is still just moving from one point to another on the surface of the Earth—like on a rectangular map unfolded from a sphere.
So given that, I think the destination should be somewhere the physical body could never reach. That’s why I hope my ashes could be scattered into space. If you’re going to die, then you should go somewhere farther, more unknown, more detached from the dusty, earthly world.
I really love the title “Fly Me to the Moon.” The first time I heard it, I found it incredibly romantic—to take someone (or be taken) to a lonely, uninhabited, gray moon full of craters, with low gravity, and live there, leaving Earth behind. That’s so romantic, because in a way, once you go to space, it’s very hard to return to Earth (unless you’re on a mission). You’d have to spend your whole life in that boundless darkness, surrounded only by planets (and maybe even extraterrestrial life). At that point, even hearing the voice of another human would be a luxury. The fear brought by immense uncertainty could consume you—but you would still choose to go into space with someone. Would you go with just anyone?
So I want to go to space after I die—to drift there, to explore everything. Maybe by then, SpaceX will have already colonized Mars, haha, and I could even “supervise” their work. Rather than remaining forever in the soil, as if still clinging to the physical body.
But I imagine that the people I love, and those who love me, would find it hard to let me go. One of the most romantic and intimate ideas is “to be buried together after death.” There’s something deeply devoted about that. And I do care about this. They would surely feel reluctant to let me drift away. But if they rest in the earth, living in that underground world, and I am in the sky, then by simply looking up, they could still see me—and I, from above, could see them too.
Although I would also find it hard to part from the people I love and who love me, rationally speaking, when a person dies, there is truly nothing left. Since death is the ultimate departure, then the destination should be a place the body can never reach—continuing an eternal existence in the vast universe, traveling between different galaxies and planets.