This blog has been looking like my personal obituary section, and I suppose it is. While I promise to change that, for this post I’ll stick with the theme, and surface some correspondence with an old friend who recommended that I read The Five People You’ll Meet in Heaven, by Mitch Albom. In the correspondence that followed, I shared some of my own views across life’s horizons. Thinking those perhaps blogworthy, here’s what I said:

Just ordered the book.

Odd that I’m a lifelong Christian (technically, Catholic) who (thanks to my wife, who is observant) attends mass every Sunday. Yet I believe the most useful teachings of all the major religions at their best are about kindness and mercy toward other people and the world, and that our sum purpose as conscious and responsible beings is to leave the place better than we found it. In this sense, eternal life is gravy, not meat and potatoes.

So I will be surprised and pleased if there really is an afterlife of some kind. And I would dearly love to hang again with those five people, plus my parents and other loved ones who are, as we say in this world of time and space, departed.

However, absent proof here in time/space world, the way to bet is pure absence: an afterlife like the beforelife.

Did you know I was working for the Psychical Research Foundation, which studied the possibility of life after death, at (but not of) Duke University when I met David Hodskins and Ray Simone? This was an occasion without which I would likely never have met Gil Templeton, Kim Cameron, Craig Burton and others I’ve memorialized online. It see now for the first time that the poetry in that, with those guys—all younger than me—while I’m still here. Wherever this is.

Our favorite priest, Father Sean Olaoire, calls people “spirits in space suits.” This is consistent with Bill Hicks‘ take: “It’s just a ride.” Sean and Bill’s case: we are timeless beings who catch a ride in time and get off when it’s over. We need Wise Ones like Jesus to tell us that our world view is insufficient, and the real myth is mortality.

So, we’ll find out. Or not. Either way, it’s best to clean up first. I’m at that stage now, even though I still have work to do. Back to it.

So I’m back. See you soon.

My email archive contains dozens of postings in which Heather Armstrong* and I are among those writing, receiving, mentioning, mentioned, cc’d or otherwise included. Most postings are from the ’00s and between bloggers in the brief age before media got social and blogging was still hot shit. Heather, with her Dooce blog, was the alpha among us, but never snotty about it.

Heather wore her heart, her head, her life, on the Web page. At humorous, opinionated, and wince-worthy self-disclosure, Heather even out-raged Chris Locke, aka RageBoy. Heather, Chris and I might have met for a panel at the 2006 SXSW, had Chris made the trip. Wrote Chris, “I was nearly as bummed as Doc said he was that I wasn’t there in Austin today on the ‘Cluetrain: Seven Years Later’ panel. What can I say? If God had wanted people to fly, he would have given them upgrades.” Best I recall, that panel was the only time I met Heather in person. She was fun.

Her final post was on April 6. It is mostly about, and for, her daughter Leta Louise. The closing line is “Here at 18 months sober, I salute my 18-year-old frog baby, she who taught me how to love.” According to news reports, Heather had fallen off the wagon. Whatever the reason, she fell all the way, and we will be forever lessened by her loss.

*On her Instagram, Facebook and Twitter accounts, all branded Dooce, she identified as Heather B. Hamilton, her birth name.