The Last Handful of Clover - Book 1: The Hereafter

1.28 Something Out of Balance

June 6, 11:24 am

The boy was writing again, but Richard was just content to lie beside him and look up at the clouds passing overhead.

I never expected death to bring clarity, he thought. But I had expected it to bring finality.

Throughout his long life, Richard had dismissed religion as offering too easy of an answer to the meaning of death. He wasn't so cynical as to think that religion held no insights for the living. Especially as a Sanskrit scholar, he was well versed in the deep dives religious thinkers had made into the great philosophical questions. But for all the insight he found in the Vedas and the Upanishads, he found most religious mythology around life after death to be unsatisfying, and raising more questions than they answered. Heaven, Nirvana, and Reincarnation all seemed like far too easy of an answer for the great black mystery of death.

Perhaps more than most, Richard had been tormented by a fear of death and a terror of what, if anything, was on the other side of death's door. But whatever was there, Richard had always expected death itself to answer that question. And even if that clarity came in the form of being snuffed out of existence, even if the answer was that nothing came after death, at least that would finally end the uncertainty.

Even if it wasn't a satisfying answer, at least it would be an answer.

So why are things more confusing and less meaningful on this side of death's door, than they ever were when I was alive?

Perhaps the answer was just something much darker than he imagined. Perhaps it was that suffering itself was the ultimate meaning of life and death. His mind wanted to reject that as being too cynical, even for him, but what if that truly was the core of the mystery?

If so, how pathetic it all was, after all.

No, that can't be it, he thought, still lying on the blanket next to the boy who was scribbling furiously. What is happening here can't just be normal and natural. Something strange has landed me here. Something abnormal. Something... out of balance.

He stared unblinking into the blue sky, with tiny white clouds moving lonely across it like sailboats. He had to believe this was some kind of error, or a glitch. But that meant that the mystery of life and death was far more complex, and far stranger, than he had ever imagined.

For years before he died, Richard had been nagged by a recurring feeling. It wasn't constant, but it was persistent enough to be noticeable and troubling. Sometimes he felt as if he were a sleepwalker, going through the motions of his life, but not really really living it. The feeling was strange and disconcerting, and he likened it to being an actor in a play, reciting the lines he had learned and going through the emotions required—not because they were his own, but because there was a great cosmic audience out there that expected it of him.

These feelings had become more and more frequent as he moved into his fifties. He had tried not to let it trouble him, convincing himself that this was just the natural state of men of a certain age. I'm just having my typical mid-life crisis, he had thought. Maybe a detached and disconnected and confused feeling is just part of the modern condition.

When he looked back at his life, he knew that there was great joy and beauty and love there. Yes, there were regrets, but who had lived a half century without a few of those?

Why then, he had wondered, had he so often felt like life had lost much of the magic it once had?

Even his love for Keith, as intense and joyful as it was, often felt like something he was watching unfold from a distance—as if the gentleness and the touching and the laughter, and even the love itself, were just film clips to be filed away.