Death at a Discount

By Kai Zaremba (Pseudonym: Leander Moss)

You die a premature death. Sad.
You get to become a ghost after death. You get to teleport anywhere, make friends with magical creatures and play back your life on a plasma TV. NOT SAD!

Be the part of an extraordinary journey of the after-life: funny, amusing, philosophical, mystical and emotional.

Experience what it'd be like to have all your past lives at a glance, and a giant ogre for a spirit guide who helps you with questions about life (actually, lives), universe, rebirth, enlightenment and what not!

Experience the afterlife while you're still alive!!!

• Language: English
• Publisher: BadPress
• Release date: Nov 22, 2019
• ISBN: 9781071518366

Book preview

Dedicated to my father, who always loved and supported me.

If you bring out that which rests in you,

that which you bring out shall save you.

If you do not bring out what rests in you,

that which you do not bring out, shall destroy you.

Jesus of Nazareth, Gospel of Thomas

I had hardly imagined things this way. My plan had been an entirely different one. I still should have been able to foresee it though. Given that most of the things in life happen almost entirely differently than we plan for, I could easily have come to realize things aren't much different even after death. Anyway, moving on, today was really an inconvenient point in time to bite the dust. I wasn't done living yet! There remain so many things I’d have liked to do while I was alive. To top it all, this damned light in the death tunnel blinded me like the lighthouse of Alexandria the yacht of Ptolemy.                   The Tibetan Book of the Dead says that the odds of attaining enlightenment, i.e., the chance of stepping out of this eternal cycle of birth and death once and for all, are the maximum immediately after death. In other words, the odds of grabbing the enlightenment trophy are at their peak when the light blinds us. After that, it would get exponentially more difficult with time to achieve Nirvana from this ‘intermediate state’. The state in which I was now stuck. Putting it in a gist, I somehow missed the exit! Well, honestly, there was no sign at that place that read This way for enlightenment. All said and done, however, it was better that way. Had I attained enlightenment, this book would not have existed. For the readers who'd prefer enlightenment directly during the phase of the light tunnel, I recommend the practice of Phowa. Google for yourself what Phowa means and how it works!

I mentioned this earlier but my pain is worth reiterating: I wasn’t pleased with the timing of my death. This probably has something to do with the long list of unfinished tasks in life, which we all carry around like baggage: Later in my life I'll do this ... I’ll get rich ... I’ll start a business ... I’ll make it big ... I’ll take a world tour ... I’ll write a book ... and so on and so forth. The list is endless. Dear readers, being the only person among you all to have the privilege of being dead, if I may offer you a well-intentioned advice, do all those things now! It’s now, or never. There’s bound to be a permanent stop to life at some point of time anyway. That's why, carpe diem and mens sana in Campari soda, or whatever!

Speaking of the Later I’ll do this and that... aspiration, I'd like to throw in a joke: An old couple sat before of the divorce judge. The judge asked the husband,

How old are you for real? 

I’m Ninety Eight., the husband answered.     

And your wife?

Ninety five.

Why on earth do you want to get divorced at this old age?, the judge asked.                         

Oh, you know, we decided to wait until the kids died.

The important actuality I was aware of even before I died is the fact that all energy in life is borrowed. That means I’m going to have to return it at some point. Amazingly, most people know this and yet they continue to build castles in the air and pretend they’re going to live forever. In this regard, the ancient Toltecs recommend (I recommend it too, since I’m dead now) that every moment of life must be considered bearing in mind the conscious realization of our mortality. This helps wipe out almost all worries and fears, except for the fear of death, of course. But this fear will vanish too, once you finish reading my book. If it still doesn't, it’ll definitely go away after you die. Incidentally, all possible fears in life could be attributed to just the one fear. You already know which one: The fear of death, as quoted by the Toltecs and C.G. Jung, I guess. In fact, if we're conscious of our own mortality, such issues – for instance, the issue regarding whether the branches of the cherry tree from the neighbor’s garden wribelong to you now that they hang high over your side of the fence, or whether they still belong to the neighbor - will be rendered insignificant.             Before I continue to talk about the light that nearly took away the precious eyesight of my surreal self, I guess the narration about how I died might interest you. The synopsis: I was heading straight and looked to the right, when the tram came from the left. The amusing part is, when you die so suddenly, you don't even get time to notice you're dead. I was literally thrown out of my body. I could then see a myriad bunch of people gather curiously in a semicircle at the accident site in the rains, around the driver’s cabin that led the tram. Naturally, unable to contain my curiosity, I went near the crowd to catch a glimpse of the sight that caused over twenty adult humans to gather hurriedly even in this lousy weather. In fact, I should have got hold of my reality at the very moment I asked about the incident to one of the onlookers and got absolutely no response. But I dismissed his behavior without much thought, thinking the incident was probably so interesting that the onlooker didn't even pay heed to what I asked. It was not until much later that I realized he couldn’t hear me, given that I was in some kind of intermediate state just before the tunnel light, a state the deceased people transit to, the ones who do not die a natural death but owing to murder or perhaps an accident, just like I did.                               Coming back to the onlookers... I stood there at the outer edge of the circle-of-curious-onlookers, and waited courteously until a gap opened up amid the crowd, allowing clear view of the spectacle. If I had known earlier that I could move through everything and everyone thanks to the ‘Ghostly body of light’ I had turned into, I’d have walked right through to the front part of the crowd. I'm sorry, I didn’t know better. I've died for the first time in my life and, fundamentally being an old school gentleman, my modesty forbade me to jump the ‘circular queue’. If there’s something I could assuredly say I did in my life, it was waiting. Have you ever noticed how much time in our life we spend waiting? The larger part of it, probably. We wait for the bus, for the long weekend, for the vacation, for the working day to end, for better weather, for our child to be born, for our child's puberty, and then suddenly, for it all to end! Significantly enough, even doctors have a waiting room by their clinic, usually a dreaded and nervous place for the patient. Even you, as a reader, are waiting for me to stop writing about the concept of waiting and damn well tell you what happened next. However, please be lenient and understanding of the fact that as a person who died just recently, and after a pretty long life, I really need to talk to someone, regardless of the cruel fate I met with. The beautiful thing about waiting is that this, too, shall eventually pass. That's the way it is with everything that happens in life. It ends at some point. This fact comes to the rescue particularly in situations that aren’t really great, which are part of everyone’s life. At some point, even this will be over! Well then, even my wait was over at some point and the rift in the dense crowd, which I was longing for, opened up. The first thing that struck me about the person or what was left of him was the clothes. The poor galoot, who lay on the rails with limbs terrifyingly twisted and face down, was wearing the same jacket as me. While the driver of the tram and a ticket inspector were jointly trying to cordon off the accident scene, the outrageously loud siren of the emergency ambulance, which took the pole position before the fire department and was followed closely by the police, could be heard all over. Does help ever arrive on time?!! He's dead! shrieked one of the people standing there, getting a synchronous nod on his remark from the other onlookers. I recognized the jacket on the body of the corpse, after which my eyes fell on his trousers and shoes. I could clearly recognize even those two garments. I slowly began to realize something wasn’t quite right here. I anxiously buried my teeth in my forefinger curled round my lower lip and let my gaze wander slowly to the dead man's head and saw, under the blood-smeared blue wool cap, the familiar gray-black curls which I was dead sure (Dead sure?! Oh the punny irony!) I had seen somewhere. That was when, suddenly, I jerked backwards in shock. Coming to think of it, I could have asked the guy standing next to me to pinch me. But my anxiety attack led me to a more ‘spectacular’ resort. I stepped into the middle of the circle and yelled, I think that’s me on the rails there. Of course, nobody heard me. Hello! I shouted. No response. I could sense my fear erupt in crazy bursts until the moment it totally vanished. I was no longer scared. I was calm. I then had the thought that the whole thing had to be part of a new episode of ‘Just for laughs: Gags!!’, and that one of my friends had probably staged a prank. Okay, you won. You can stop with this scary stuff now. Where’s the camera though? You've done this pretty convincingly, guys. I so fell for it! But now you're busted, I guess. And yet, nobody paid attention to me. Not a single soul looked in my direction. Oh, they cannot be that good. Are they all professional actors? I was really angry now, my patience having got pushed over the edge due to the terrifying way the events were unfolding. Only one thing might help now, I thought. I had to grab one of the onlookers by the scruff of the neck and shake