"What happens when I die?"
COVID-19 DISPATCH โฃ๏ธ TOKYO, JAPAN โฃ๏ธ 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 โ that's routine at this point.
But ๐ฆ๐ป1.0, 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 ๐ฉ๐ป, 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 โ 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 ๐ฆ๐ป๐ถ๐ป know about the coronavirus โ but not really. They know they are washing their hands to protect against it and they know everybody is concerned about it.
But ๐ฆ๐ป1.0 knows that thousands of people have died from it in ๐ฎ๐น and ๐ช๐ธ and now ๐บ๐ธ.
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.
KEYWORDS: coronavirus, COVID-19, the Grim Reaper, I was never a big fan of the email lady but if she was President lots of people who have died in the past few weeks wouldn't have