You Can Choose Your Afterlife

Eric Gamalinda wrote a poem called "You Can Choose Your Afterlife," in his 1999 book, Zero Gravity. It is one of my very favorite books, and perhaps one of the most complete collections of poetry I have ever encountered*. In this poem, the speaker addresses a friend, real or created, who decided to take his own life:

---------------------------
"You Can Choose Your Afterlife"**

according to the strange customs
of the T'boli
who believe we are not judged

by good or evil
but by the kind of death
we meet: to die by the sword

is to enter the kingdom
where everything
even the sound of water

is red They welcome you there
with the tintinnabulation
of copper bells

and the lamentation
of bamboo violins
and all night long

a wounded sun hovers
over your place of business
And those who drown

return to the navel of the sea
(that's what they call it)
where they become subjects

of Fon Muhin, god
of all creatures
who breathe water And those

who die of sickness
go to Mogul
where they receive everything

they've always desired
but are not free of suffering
And those who kill themselves

go to a place exactly like earth
but where everything sways
even in sleep

Arne you didn't tell us
why you wanted
to go

we can only imagine you
in a world where
you can't keep a cup

of coffee still
and people keep changing
the rules for soccer

because the ball
keeps rolling away
You won't miss us

everything moves in the same
direction You were always
one step ahead
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I think about this poem a lot, particularly the line in which the speaker first addresses his friend, Arne; "Arne, you didn't tell us/ why you wanted/ to go"

The speaker is so obviously at peace with the lack of closure in this situation. He doesn't know why Arne took his own life, but he's not going to spend the rest of his life trying to figure it out. I have spent many hours wondering about questions I'll never be able to answer. I haven't made peace with many of them, but it's an ongoing quest.

We, humans, have the desire to know why. Why did it happen? Why did they do it? We'll never know. But that's not the point of this poem.

This is a poem about empowerment. In death, in which most of us imagine that we have no choice, Gamalinda is positing that maybe, in some ways, we do have a choice.

The answer to the riddle of Arne's suicide is hidden in these stanzas, but the answer is something that pertains to much more than suicide, or death. This isn't a poem about death. This is a poem about choice. If you have can choose your afterlife, then your possibilities in life are endless.

You can choose anything.





*I have a system of grading poetry; it's somewhat elementary and childish, but it works very well for me. I put a star on poems I like, a check next to poems I have read (let's call them neutral), and a "re." on poems I don't understand the first time through; this way, when I re-read a book, I know which to give special attention ("re."), which to give another shot (check), and which are already favorites (star). This means that, to me, the mark of a truly "good" collection (in a very generic sense, and barring any poet's collected works) is the ratio of stars to the total number of poems. By this reasoning, any ratio of 1:2 or higher is "good." I starred 26 of the 34 poems in this book on the first reading (and if I were to re-do my marks now, I'd star them all).

**Eric Gamalinda, I fully acknowledge that I have absolutely no permission to reprint any of your work in part, or in whole. However, I must warn you that if you contact me asking me to remove your work, you are going to subject yourself to a barrage of questions filled with breathless adulation, and a standing invitation to every one of my birthday parties.