What happens when we die?

(From Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass)

Erin Greene:

What happens when we die Riley?

Riley Flynn:

I don’t know and I don’t trust anyone who tells us that they do but…

When I die, my body stops functioning…clinical death and a bit later like five whole minutes later, my brain cells start dying but in the meantime in between maybe my brain releases a flood of DMT. It’s the psychedelic drug released when we dream so I dream, I dream bigger than I have ever dreamed before. Because it’s all of it just the last dump of DMT all at once and my neurons are firing and I am seeing this firework display of memories and imagination and I am just tripping…

And it’s a curtain call

The dream to end all dreams one last great dream as my mind empties the fucking missile silos and then I stop, my brain activity ceases and there is nothing left of me…

No pain, no memory, no awareness that I ever was, that I ever hurt someone…

Everything is as it was before me…

And the electricity disperses from my brain toll it’s just dead tissue…

Meat.

Oblivion.

And all the other little things that make me up, the microbes and bacterium and the billion other little things that live on my eyelashes and in my hair and in my mouth and on my skin and in my gut and everywhere else, they just keep on living and eating and…

I’m serving a purpose.

I’m feeding life.

And I’m broken apart and all the littlest pieces of me are just recycled and I’m billions of other places and my atoms are in plants and bugs and animals and I’m like the stars that are in the sky,

there one moment and then just scattered across the goddamn cosmos.