What happens when you die?

Two of my kids and I recently watched the original Superman: The Movie (ALERT: SPOILERS). It was one of my favorite movies as a kid, and watching it brought back a rockslide of memories along with an awareness of how we’ve lost a general patience with exposition. It used to take SO LONG for a movie to get started. Even after the extended overture with its opening credits and quaint storybook graphics introduce us to the setting and the emotional arc along which we’re about to set sail, the stories themselves always seem in retrospect to start so slow. Much like this post.

But it’s the climax at the end of the film that really stood out to me for obvious reasons. Knowing the superhero’s biggest weakness was not kryptonite but his love for people (Lois Lane in particular), Lex Luthor directed two missiles capped with nuclear warheads to America’s opposite coasts. Superman had to choose between saving his beloved Lois Lane (and all of California) and saving the people on the east coast (Miss Tessmacher had just freed Superman from kryptonite on the condition he head east to save her aunt in New Jersey).

Long story short, Superman honored his promise by saving the east coast first, but arrived too late to save Lois. He found her dead in her car, buried under six tons of earth and rock.

But it wasn’t over.

Oh no, it wasn’t over AT ALL. Superman unleashed a primal yelp that sent the birds of the earth scattering for cover, and for good reason. Our man in tights promptly circumnavigated the globe east-to-west style and literally turned back the earth and time with it, undoing everything that had happened after the first missile had been redirected to space (and if you’ve seen Superman II, you know he should have kept going just a little further).

The dude reversed the earth’s spin on its axis and then set it back at normal speed like he was replaying his favorite jam on a vinyl record, and just like that, Lois was alive again. BAM.

As a kid, I spent way too long thinking about if that could really happen, but for good reason. I wanted to believe that if someone died and we wanted them back badly enough, SOMEONE had the power to undo death. A ton of my favorite stories and movies featured this plot twist: you think someone’s dead, but it’s not over. BAM, they’re back alive.

The movies where that didn’t happen were a lot harder to watch. Bambi’s mom? That’s it. Old Yeller? Rocky’s trainer, Mickey? Mr. Miyagi? There were some rough ones. Those characters don’t come back. I never thought that was fair.

It’s funny how we think it should be fair. We think we should live happily ever after. We believe in our hearts that the people who made our life so much more than worth living will always be with us and, ultimately, we will be with them forever.

I really want that to be true. I believe it to be true. But I’m starting to think it’s a mistake to live like it’s true.

So many of life’s fears grow so much bigger when we’re afraid to reckon with the possibility that they’ll be realized. The possibility that we’ll lose Lois forever is so awful that we panic at the mere thought, so much so that we refuse to ask the question, What if that’s all there is? What if I’ll never see my loved ones again? What if there’s nothing waiting for me after death? What if there is no me after death?

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with believing there’s more. But. I also don’t think there’s anything wrong with mentally exploring the answers to those questions. So often, we treat the question of What meaning does life have if it ends when we die? as some sort of rhetorical knockout blow instead of a question to actually think about.

It’s worth thinking about. Life has meaning as it is. If there is no more life beyond the grave, what we get is still a lot. I don’t think it’s impossible to be thankful for what we have without expecting eternity on top of it all.

Maybe our best life is one in which we hope for what may be but we’re grateful for what has been.

I won’t be sharing this one. If you’d like to, my eternal thanks will follow you forever like a loyal puppy.