WAITING FOR DEATH OR IS THE BODY LOSING AND/OR GAINING DENSITY

My relative, a much younger one, was not necessarily interested in talking about death. I understood his discomfort. Death and its related arrangements are not and should not be the concern of a young man. Quite a few older people do not believe in even talking about it. When asked about her death and how she wanted her’s to be dealt with, an old lady (I am quoting from a newspaper article) said to her children, “Surprise me.” It was quite clear that she was, as an old Puerto Rican saying goes,“vivita y coleando.” Not need to deal with what one might have very little power or control over its “process”, the moment of the big move. Some might find death as pedestrian as deciding if one eats an apple or a banana, or as interesting as if there is a new phase, even a new place to reside. Forget about Limbo: pope Benedict said that it does not exist; and those who were there looking for a new place will have a difficult decision to make. Francisco added that there is no Inferno either; thus, Catholics are left with Paradise, and that must be a very boring place. Luckily, according to some anthropologists studying the old Mayan petroglyphs (remember not to confuse Mayan speakers with the Mayan peoples long disappeared from the earth or with those with whom they mixed: the other peoples they conquered before the Conquistadores took over them, but that is another story), are suggesting that the old conquerors South of the Aztecs, Mixtecs and Olmecs and North of the Arawaks and Incas believed that death as such did not exists, it was a matter of losing density, simply put, a dilution of matter. So when I told the young relative that my desire was not to be cremated, because I did not want to be diluted into the gassy atmosphere; but to be buried deep into the earth, in order to be blended with the soil and its worms, he was happy I could become part of his garden. I would have continued with the ideas proposed by the Harvard professor, Lynn Margulis and her lecture -given at the sabotaged CCNY Workshop Center for Open Education- on the lives of mountains and the reasons for their increase or decrease of density in their corpus, or  talked about Alan Kardec, who claimed that, for whatever reasons, a dead body’s essence can end up encrusted in the walls of a building or with reincarnation and becoming a cow in India, but he is not into adoring animals or even eating them, since he is a strict vegetarian, and not because he does not want his density to be transformed by animals, but because meat does not go well with him; until I pointed to him that his skin was covered with bacterias. He grew up in the sanitized middle class North and never had to take purgatives as we did in the poorer tropics, to get rid of all kinds of worms that increased our intestines' density.