The SpacesuitMy Sweetheart, who is as wise as she is beautiful, refers to death as taking off the spacesuit.
Imagine you were an astronaut, out for a little space walk, puttering around the station perhaps, fixing up the solar panels, when suddenly you encountered a being from another galaxy. Let us say that you and the being exchanged astronaut pleasantries and looked each other over, possibly even touched each other, and then your new E.T. friend vanished, headed back to the mother ship all atwitter with news of the strange new species he had just encountered.
That being from a galaxy far far away would probably describe you as looking like their equivalent of the Pillsbury Doughboy or the Michelin Man. You were, he would report, bulky and white, with a glassy countenance. Then he might suggest that he believed that the spacesuit was just an outer shell. Underneath it, he believed, he had glimpsed something wonderful, graceful, elastic,
The SpacesuitMy Sweetheart, who is as wise as she is beautiful, refers to death as taking off the spacesuit.
Imagine you were an astronaut, out for a little space walk, puttering around the station perhaps, fixing up the solar panels, when suddenly you encountered a being from another galaxy. Let us say that you and the being exchanged astronaut pleasantries and looked each other over, possibly even touched each other, and then your new E.T. friend vanished, headed back to the mother ship all atwitter with news of the strange new species he had just encountered.
That being from a galaxy far far away would probably describe you as looking like their equivalent of the Pillsbury Doughboy or the Michelin Man. You were, he would report, bulky and white, with a glassy countenance. Then he might suggest that he believed that the spacesuit was just an outer shell. Underneath it, he believed, he had glimpsed something wonderful, graceful, elastic, muscular, and so much more beautiful than its bulky carapace.
I can imagine his cynical alien boss pooh-poohing the notion. "I''ve seen them," he might say. "And what you see is what you get. There is no inner earthling, separate and alive, which animates the outer earthling. Why," he might add, "I have even had occasion to measure their life span. It is there in the rectangular hump on their backs. It is called oxygen and when it runs out they die. Period. End of story."
So it is with us, says my Sweetheart. What some call Death is simply a discarding of the spacesuit. That''s what we bury, the old suit, no longer needed.
I was there when my brother got a glimpse of that place where spacesuits are no longer necessary. I was there when he took off his suit, and later...when he sent me a postcard from the other side.
Copyright © 2008 by Dan Gordon
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Excerpted from Postcards from Heaven by Dan Gordon Copyright © 2008 by Dan Gordon. Excerpted by permission.
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