I know where I am, or perhaps it’s better to say I know where I’m not. I know I’m not dead.
Being not-dead is not all it’s cracked up to be. It was my choice, but I can’t say that it was a wise one.
When I was alive, I paid a lot of money to have my body cryogenically preserved so that when science figured out how to cure whatever it was that killed me, I could be brought back to life. I even careful financial investments to ensure that upon my return I would live in a grand style–an obscenely grand style.
I can’t see back to where the living are, so I have no idea how science is advancing, or how well my investments are compounding. Even though I can’t see the living I can see the dead. They look translucent–not faded–kind of like they’re here and somewhere else at the same time. Occasionally I feel that one of them senses me, or even almost sees me, but is not able to figure out just what that something–me is. Now I know how ghosts in all those horror stories supposedly feel.
The dead are happy—very happy. It’s like they’ve finally gotten to where they want to be. They smile. The laugh. They’re always in groups sharing something or another. I can even see the dead celebrating the various religious holidays.
I envy them.
I remember being taught to live like a spiritual being passing through a material world. I remember in Sunday School being told that Jesus said that there were many mansions in his Father’s house. As near as I can tell, what’s supposed to happen is that each of us lives our life on earth and then moves on. All of the dead that I see appear to have done just that.
I, on the other hand, by choosing to be cryogenically preserved, never completely died, and am held to my past life by the thinnest of threads. Maybe someday science will bring me back; but it’ll be to a world in which I have no friends or family—to world into which I will not fit. A world to which I do not belong. It’s like a fourth dimensional and near-eternal Man Without a Country.
The best I can hope for is a cataclysmic disaster or an unscrupulous worker to disconnect my cryogenic pod so my body can thaw and finally die. Until then, I just wait.
*Since I’m on vacation, I pulled up the unpublished drafts I had written (turns out there were 30 of them) and decided to make life easy and use one of them.
sfnowak 
Wow, Steve, are we on a similar wavelength or what? One of my daily prayers is the Lord’s Prayer, and what recently caught my rapt attention is “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” I thought to myself, “Self,
is your will God’s will? Can only the dead see the end of life’s war as we experience it here on earth?”
Thank God I woke up from this frightening, pessimistic and hopeless nightmare. There can be heaven on earth and peace each time we think of and remember God. There is no death each time we remember a loved one. We can see an end to life’s war when our will is God’s will. And we are an exceptionally blessed people when we accept God’s grace and are grateful and thankful. Why? Because He told us so.