What Happens When You Die?

And other questions I've been asked—a Healings FAQ.

Apr 11, 2024

Inquisitive dog photo by Camylla Battani, via Unsplash.

The thing about Battling Cancer for six months and then having a baby is it’s like living in a bomb shelter—you get updates from the outside world, but what you’re mostly concerned with is having enough food on hand to last until the next time you can plausibly go to a restaurant, which may be never. It means that while I’ve communicated with most of my friends, I haven’t seen many of them in person, let alone sat down for meals. But recently that’s started to change. The baby’s durable enough to take to Costco (she really enjoys going to Costco), and I’ve had the time, energy, and babysitting resources to make plans with friends, many of whom I haven’t seen since The Before Times. And given everything that’s happened, said friends inevitably have questions, sometimes big questions, such as: Did Battling Cancer give you a better sense of what happens when you die?

A good friend actually posed this very reasonable question to me last week over smoked beets and an 18-ounce ribeye. What struck me, however, is that even though I’ve been asked this several times in the last year, and even nodded in the direction of an answer in this space, I didn’t have a clear, ready-made reply. And this question—what happens when we die?—is one of several I’ve received in the last few months that circumscribe the editorial purview of our project here, and as such I figured I might as well collect them. And so herewith is the inaugural Healings FAQ. The following are actual questions I’ve been asked in the past year, along with answers that reflect my point of view at this particular moment time.

Disclaimer: All answers subject to change. I do not claim to be an expert in any of the following! Your mileage may vary, don’t try this at home, etc. etc.

What happens when we die?

Everything and nothing. By “nothing” I mean I don’t believe that death is a road trip to heaven, and that we’ll all be reunited with our pets in some kind of groovy afterlife event space with great catering, like Burning Man without the porta potties. I think that when you die it’s just lights out, period. But by “everything” I mean that each of us is already an inextricable part of the entire known and unknown universe, that we are already a contiguous whole with things like raspberry bushes and turtle doves and Saturn’s rings, and that while we may be too obsessed with this notion of the “self” on a minute-to-minute basis to ever feel this in our bones, death forces the issue. The self dissolves and we (re)merge with the infinite, and that for reasons I can’t articulate but have faith in, this isn’t as scary as it sounds.

Does this mean you’re not afraid of death?

I wish. In some respects it’s all I think about—the idea of nothingness, of separateness, of the loneliness I associate with those things. For the most part it’s only on an intellectual level that I can conceive of the whole merging-with-the-infinite scenario, and even then it doesn’t provide the kind of comfort I wish it did. But this, to me, is one of the main reasons to develop a spiritual practice. Focusing on death, which most spiritual pursuits do to greater and lesser extents, is a great way to help each of us understand how we want to live our lives with the time we have.

What is prayer, for someone who doesn’t believe in God?

Prayer is about getting quiet and carefully listening for what fills the space. To quote the great Bill Callahan, aka the musician Smog, “God is a word, and the argument ends there.” I think this is good news and bad news. The bad news is God isn’t a Zoltar machine that grants wishes. The good news is “God” gets to be whatever you want it to be, and prayer is the process by which we each discover that for ourselves.

How do I get sober/reduce my drinking?

There are so many resources out there, but that can be its own challenge: Of the hundreds of options, what will work for me based on my goals? Contemplating this can be daunting. Enough people have asked me this over the years that I created this google doc to share, so feel free to crib anything you want from that. But here’s what I’d say up front: Pray on it. By “pray” I don’t necessarily mean “Ask God,” since see above. What I mean is: Get quiet and listen, see if you can pull out the signal from the noise. What’s leading you to even ask this question? (Most people never ask this question.) The initial answer might be hangovers, spousal ultimatums, or a bank balance that can’t dunk, but I promise that if you listen, there’s a good chance the motivation runs deeper. Do your best to tune in to that. And also, just get started—you’ll probably try several things before you find the few that click.

How do I meditate?

This is another thing where the resources are plentiful to an overwhelming extent and a Google search bar can do more harm than good. But for as complicated as the meditation world is—especially here in 2024, when there are countless apps and sites all duking it out in the ever-expanding mindfulness market—it’s really very simple: You just sit down, close your eyes, and follow your breath. Here’s how tenth-century Indian meditation master Tilopa put it in his “Six Nails” (sweet hardcore band name), or Six Words of Advice:

Let go of what has passed
Let go of what may come
Let go of what is happening now
Don’t try to figure anything out
Don’t try to make anything happen
Relax, right now, and rest

How are you feeling?

This is probably the most frequently asked of the FAQs, and the short answer is I feel fine, but the longer answer is more complicated. I mean, prior to Battling Cancer I knew very little about Battling Cancer, so I’m sure if I’d had a friend who’d recently Battled Cancer I would have assumed they’d be feeling various reverberations and aftershocks for some extended period of time, that something as gnarly as chemotherapy would leave a person with assorted longer-term side effects, that the stress of it all would just kind of…linger. And some of this has happened: I’ve mentioned that my feet are now permanently half-asleep as a result of nerve damage caused by the chemo agent vincristine, and I do have a sort of PTSD-ish response (specifically: tears) to even the most hamfisted fictionalized cancer scenarios depicted in movies and TV, like the guy in 3 Body Problem whose case seems terminal but who I’m just guessing (no spoilers, please) is eventually saved somehow by the alien tech. But I also feel weirdly put on the spot by this question, because I feel like my answer should be more dramatic and befitting the overall arc of the thing, especially for friends I’m seeing for the first time since it happened. A simple “I feel fine,” while basically true, strikes me as kind of a letdown in these cases, and I’ve noticed I usually feel compelled to append all manner of qualifications to it, like usually the foot thing or something about how my next oncology checkup is less than three months away so we’ll see. And I guess I do this both for the benefit of the friend who’s asking, as well as for myself, as a kind of favor to myself, an acknowledgement that, while this thing is basically in the rearview mirror, it always and forever will be in the rearview mirror, a thing, an event, that’s escapable but never quite escaped from, a permanent asterisk on a simple and frequently asked question, one we pose to one another more or less every single day.

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Healings is written by Garrett Kamps and edited by Tommy Craggs. Ayana H. Muwwakkil provides art direction.

Healings is about illness, recovery, spirituality, and related topics, and began in the summer of 2023 as a chronicle of Garrett’s battle with cancer. We make no guarantees that it will hold together, thematically speaking, in the months to come.

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