Short Story: Dave meets up with his old neighbour Mike, in Heaven, now a changed man..

Tweet

Dave was getting older, and at 66 years of age, thoughts of his life, often came into his head. Dave lived by himself, and he liked to go down to the nearby beach, and sit down on the old stone wall there, and think about these very things, over and over. How would he die? What would his future health be like? What would the rest of his life be like? Dave was a bit lost and depressed about his thinking of these types of questions, which seldom had any real answers to them, for himself, from himself. Then, one day, he met Mike again, a neighbour, who lived several doors down the road. Mike said to him something rather profound, though, on this day. "If we do not find our answers here, we will have to make sense of it from there, on the other side of death, instead." Dave and Mike had had many a chat over the garden fence, over their many years of acquaintance, mostly these talks were just about the weather, or about how the costs of living were always increasing. This uncouth, old school type of a guy, swore heartily and cursed God, and all else, as he jokingly made his way through life, without much of a care in his World. Dave was not like this. He was basically a religious-minded person, afraid to swear, and to carry on like Mike. He was afraid of letting go like this, and he always stayed in control of himself around himself, and yet this very control, controlled him so much, that he hated himself for it. Then he died. He ended up in another World, talking to some type of a mentoring figure there, who had the hide to be going through Dave's life with him. Lo, and behold, this was Mike. Dave had not known that Mike had died too, only a week or two before himself, and because Dave had known Mike, Mike was assigned to talk him over, during the grace period, in his new place of abode. Dave hated talking to someone like Mike like this, but in that one week that Mike had died ahead of himself, it seemed now that Mike was a changed, different person, in this new spirit body of his. He was wise, not swearing anymore, and he was being very patient, in his going over of this introduction/orientation period, for Dave, into this new life here now. "Death might sometimes take us by surprise", Mike said to Dave, "but never be surprised about what you might find here after your death. Death is not the end of it all. Death awakens us to who we really are, if we were not living from this part of ourselves before. Death is not a part of life, until it becomes a part of you." Dave looked at Mike, as he shook his head in his disbelief. Surely, this was not the Mike, that he once knew. "Ha, ha," Mike said, "I know what you must be thinking Dave, but death gives us depth to our life, especially is this true, to those who used to swim in the shallows of life before, as I did. After my death, I was forced to swim into these deeper waters, and it has changed me now forever." Photo Credit: The photo used in this article was sourced from the free media site, pixabay.com Dave sitting on his spot on the old stone wall at the beach, thinking about his coming death.