I have been reading
Alan Bennett's Untold Stories (doing a bit better in the Amazon rankings than Talking Cock I notice). It's really excellent. A bit depressing, but moving, intelligent, thoughful and as you might expect exquisitely and honestly written. It deals with death and ageing and mental decline, but it's also very good on families. A lot of the stuff rang bells with what I've been trying to write in my family based sit-com: the secrets and lies and the affectations and affections. I've had a few friends recently having to deal with the death or illness of a parent and though my own mother and father seem in pretty good nick (despite TK Herring's attempts to fall over or into things at any given opportunity) it's been on my mind. They'll probably outlive me, which on the positive side means I won't have to watch them go into the mental and physical decline that Bennett descries - plus I would quite like them to have to witness
the lezzing up at my funeral that I have mentioned
on many occasions. That would cheer my dad up, probably more than when he was propostioned by a prostitute in Prague. But that's for another day.
It may be selfish to wish that one's parents have to attend their son's funeral, but I am that selfish. so selfish that I would rather die than be put to some mild inconvenience.
Bennett talks about several of his relatives who ended up in mental institutions and notes how much his mother's personality changed as the inevitable mental effects of getting old afflicted her. It got me thinking about what happens when we die. Let's presume that we go to Heaven (I know it is a childish notion that offers little real comfort if you think it through, but some people seem to like the idea of people living forever in the sky and being able to look down on the disgusting things we do at any time). If your personality changes due to Alzheimer's disease or a head injury or just through the process of maturing, what personality would you get once you are in Heaven? Do you have to put up with the one that you ended up with or would God select the personality that he feels most fits you and let you regress to that one? You might think that you get to choose yourself, but I can't see that working. Because which personality would be doing the choosing? If it's the one you died with then it might not be able to properly remember the previous ones and would probably prefer to be the one it is now, even if that was more grumpy, or more frivolous than the one you had for most of your life. For example, I think I have quite a different personality to the me of 15 years ago and if I was asked to choose now I would say I would prefer my current personality. But if you gave the 23 year old me the same choice I think he would prefer to be 23. And the me in Heaven wouldn't be the me of now that I currently would prefer to be. I think the me of 30 years time will probably be a bit of a reactionary, forgetful idiot, but I bet given the choice he would say he'd rather go to Heaven as the 68 year old version of Richard Herring, rather than the puerile, irresponsible fool he once was. And who is to say that he is wrong? Well the 38 year old me and the 23 year old me for starters. None of us should be allowed to choose, but can an outside force make the decision for me? I am not sure even God is capable of deciding which of me is the preferrable Richard Herring. And what if the 68 year old version of me does a really bad sin, why should I, the 38 year old (relatively) innocent Richard Herring be punished for that adn have to go to Hell? The 23 year old version would be even less culpable of the old me's crimes and no-one could really want to punish such a pitiful idiot.
If you've forgotten all your family and friends after 20 years of dementia like Bennett's mum, do you get back all your memories? What if your husband died and you married someone else? If you got back to the previous mental state do you forget your second husband? Or do you all live together on the same cloud and manage to get along, even though the second husband worked with the first and barely waited for the corpse to get cold before he made his move?
If souls are eternal, why do our personalities change over time and why can a physical head injury make us a different person. Surely if the soul is eternal it doesn't matter what happens to the flesh.
The answer is that there is no Heaven and I am wasting my and your time in even trying to make it make logical sense. Like a children's story of TV show (like
Big Cook, Little Cook) it is pointless trying to deconstruct it, because it's an artificial construction and thus adult logic does not apply. But if it gives you some comfort to believe that this life of struggle, which will at best end with you a gibbering wreck in a hospice unable to remember a thing about yourself or the people you loved, ends by you being taken to Heaven where some version of yourself will live forever (hopefully not the final gibbering wreck one, huh, but to be honest that would seem the obvious and most fair way for proceedings to operate) then that's up to you.
Maybe it's best just not to think about these things and just pretend that we won't get old, but when we do Heaven will just be nice. That seems to be how most people get through it.
I hope I die before I get old.
