Some of you may remember the initial post about my friend Buddy being poisoned with Agent Orange in Vietnam. More collateral damage care of our government. Lovely euphemism, eh? Just between us, it usually means someone gets killed as a by-product of waging war.
Sadly, I now write a follow-up to that post.
Describing—let alone defining—the act of death is a fool’s errand. After all, how does one speak of eternity, whether spent in unremembered inky nothingness or fluttering around on angelic wings?
Still, some of us come closer than others in peaking behind the epistemological, spiritual and otherwise cosmological curtain separating the living from the dead. I’ve always liked the term “the sweet hereafter,” even if it’s hard to beat German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who called death “the supreme festival on the road to freedom.”