"What happens when I die?"

COVID-19 DISPATCH ☣️ TOKYO, JAPAN ☣️ 2020-03-31 21:28

I finally read my twitter feed to the end after work, and ... whatever. DOTARDUS said a bunch of dumb shit, and further debased the office of the US President — that's routine at this point.

But 👦🏻1.0, whose schools-are-closed epic YouTube binge-watching has become the main topic of the low-quality end-of-day conversations while dishwashing and laundering between me and 👩🏻, became a concern.

He had a fever, since yesterday, so in the current pandemic that is an automatic concern, but he didn't seem particularly ill.

Today, I remembered him asking it yesterday:

"What happens when I die?"

I was doing the dishes at the time, all the big pots and pans that do not fit into our Japanese dishwasher (it is the Tyrion Lannister of dishwashers).

"Uhhm..." I flipped to Chapter VII of the Parental Manual of Stalling for Time. "What happens when you die?"

"Yeah," he said. "What happens when I die in Minecraft?" And he gave a little grin and moved onto something else.

But then he said it again, today: "What happens when I die?"

"Well, son, you cease to exist as soon as your brain activity flatlines, your consciousness ends, all your memories are gone, and you don't exist anymore other than as a corpse made of dead flesh that is already starting to decay — and then we either burn your body to ashes or else put it in the ground where bugs and worms and bacteria slowly eat it as it rots," I didn't say.

But I also didn't have an awesome answer.

The younger 👦🏻👶🏻 know about the coronavirus — but not really. They know they are washing their hands to protect against it and they know everybody is concerned about it.

But 👦🏻1.0 knows that thousands of people have died from it in 🇮🇹 and 🇪🇸 and now 🇺🇸.

So now he's wondering what dying means.

I think he realizes that there is no respawn in real life.

So probably I had better study on it a little, and figure out what he's ready to hear.

As an interim solution I told him to get off YouTube and come build an underground bunker in Minecraft so that we could run some simulations and die a bunch of times.