Sir Kalen

For you, my beleaguered, intelligent, competent, and misguided friend: I write this, out of sympathetic and empathetic charity. I arrogantly presuppose and write this for your own good and well being. I have not much to say here, but a few questions, that I pray will linger.

Permit me first, to outlay and paint through, the recent circumstances in my life. Two weeks and two days ago, I stood somewhere. I stood beside some one. I stood with some ones. I observed something close and personal, I lost someone dear and precious. I held the hand of my grandmother as she passed away. I listened to her ragged breath slow down and cease, felt her struggling heart ease and rest. I kissed her forehead as she died and left this world.

I know I know, you'll languish with me, and regrettably point out my appeal to emotion and heart. If you do so, then I am comforted. Tis a sign, that my message is getting through. Because this is an appeal, not only to logic, but to the very naturalism that you believe in. To the conscience which you deny, yet incorrigibly live by. An appeal to the consciousness you seek for.

We share two dichotic lives and beliefs. Succinctly put, I believe in God, you do not. Of course such two paradoxical ideologies entail and curtail an innumerous tally of unresolved differences, clashes, and disputes.

This is written, not to address, but to ask, to question, to test our two lives and their structures. I've asked of you and your belief structure, what happens when we die. The answer I received was simple: we die. And cease to exist. Its an end. Nothing after.

Perhaps it is my upbringing. Most certainly it does have a huge influence on how I think and what I think. But I've not been brainwashed - so I cannot blame my upbringing. Not that I would. Yet when I hear those words, when I read them, when I observe your opinion on the matter, something recoils within me. Something inside shirks, as if in the face of horror. Something screams inside me, in denial, in rage. Something inside twists and contorts, as if stabbed, and it cries out in raging pity, "It is not so! Hear me now, I am alive!" As if lying incapacitated, immobile, and hearing the doctor say, "He's gone, we cannot help him." Yet you hear the doctor's words, and know, that you are still alive! You are pained and everything inside and alive in you screams, "Hear me now! Come back, I'm still alive!" yet strangely you are mute.

This is why I suspect my upbringing: It is that I cannot fathom how something inside of you, does not similarly scream in a raging hope. The recent events in my life, have re-awoken with in me that question, and I cannot fathom how or why you haven't asked it of yourself. I really cannot. It is so obvious in my eyes, that it nears being absurd and obnoxious. When you tell yourself that, is it in all honesty? Or is it some mantra you mindlessly reiterate, so as to rationalize your life with blatant and blaring redundancy?

I am not deluded. And as I observed my dear grandmother pass away, I felt within me, for reasons to numerous and lengthy to iterate here, that she had gone home. Her body, shell, chassis, had met its end. Yet what was inside that body, was still alive, and had moved on...

And now I reach the why of what is written: The question. Ask yourself, inside you, your mind, "Will you really just terminate? End? Fade to black? Cease to exist? The emotions and memories of a life be vanquished by entropy? Cease to exist? Disintegrate?" Ask yourself that. I feel you have not truly asked yourself that question, because you cannot hear your internal screams of "I'm ALIVE!!"

Are we gambling men? This game of life and universe we play, are we betting our lives, souls and consciousness?? Are the odds never more even? 50% I am no gambling man, I do not speculate from experience, or speculate from profession or vocation, I do not know if 50% are even odds. I do not gamble, I do not speculate. But you my friend, I feel you do. In the paraphrased words of the genius, "God does not play dice with the universe." He is correct, we are the ones throwing the dice. Hedonistically flirting with the stakes. I shall hold my cards, and play them in the end. The question once again, will only be answered in our deaths. You are a scientific man; will death be your final experiment and test? Life - this is a most dangerous game.