Little Old Lady … in Waiting

Tag: Afterlife

  • In Conversation with Dr. Cheryl Fury

    I met Cheryl Fury on the page before I met her in person. A published academic and popular history professor at UNB, I was first introduced to her irrepressible humor in a series of side-splitting social essays for The Reader, the weekend magazine of the Telegraph Journal.   Her writing was belly-laugh hilarious, whether chronicling the Pokeman world of a boy mom, or narrating a ferociously funny tale of a well-deserved weekend away with her girlfriends, her essays invited you in for a close up look at the busy, messy, unruly life of a thinking woman in her prime.  Her pieces were fresh, honest and recognizable, her voice unique, her writing capturing the unsung work and experience of a modern, educated woman in the heavy-lifting years of motherhood. Her stories were my story, and the story of a cohort of women raising children, managing careers, and working to preserve a life of the mind.  Her essays told the well-kept truth about what Irish actress, Jesse Buckley, recently called the “beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart.” She made me laugh out loud about the sticky-fingered, crayon coloured life we lead for a time, and I will always be grateful to her for that.

    Fast forward 20 years, Cheryl is an ageless, fit, and still very funny little old lady in waiting who runs 10 k a day, a sports enthusiast who played soccer until age 50.  Modelling a spiky, blond pixie cut and a triple-helix ear stack, her t-shirt reads, I incite this meeting to Rebellion.  She had me at hello. A tenured professor of history, and a Fellow at the Gregg Centre for War and Society, and the Royal Historical Society (UK), Cheryl grew up in Fredericton and earned her PhD at McMaster University.   She teaches courses in European and British history including early modern women and queenship, as well as modern Europe, with a special interest in the Holocaust and Fascism. Specializing in the social history of English sailors in the 16th and 17th centuries, she has published several books on seafarers, the men of the early English East India Company, and her current project examines the relationship between diet, disease and disorder on the high seas in the early 17th century. “Me and my sailors have a long, long romance,” she smiles.

    Cheryl is also a Holocaust educator who has worked as an editor on a number of research projects and a memoir with survivor Vera Schiff, who passed away a few years ago. Cheryl took part in a March of the Living Tour in Germany and Poland in 2010.  I asked her which of the concentration camps was the most horrific.  She told me that Majdanek in Poland was by far the worst. “There is a big concrete mausoleum at the back of the property that looks like a space ship…it holds seven tonnes of human ash.”  Cheryl also recalls an unsettling visit to the Wannsee Conference House where in 1942 the Final Solution of the Jewish question was first announced to the Nazi elite.  She describes a beautiful space right on the river, with people out in paddle boats waving on a sunny July day.  “It was so surreal…I had to leave…we had the lunch menus of what the Nazis dined on after the announcement.”

    I asked the history professor if she could encapsulate the lesson to be learned in the Holocaust, or a wisdom teaching that survivor, Vera Schiff, would want her to share with the world.  “Vera always quoted Edmund Burke,” she tells me. “The only thing that it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

    Professor Fury’s top tags in online student assessments include, “hilarious”, “amazing lectures”, “tough grader”, and “get ready to read,” with 100 percent of respondents stating they would take her course again.  Cheryl smiles recalling one student who wrote “overrated.” She laughs and suggests that maybe that’s true too.  On her role as an academic, Cheryl has a lot to say about the blight of AI on campus.  “Chat GPT has some amazing uses but it’s not a good tool to find academic sources. It both astonishes at times and then makes stuff up – like a smart but bad, possibly drunk boyfriend.”

    “My role, I hope, is to cultivate independent thinking, writing and researching skills and now, more and more, the ability to identify what is real and not real in the age of AI. Learning how to check facts and cross reference is critical.  In the current moment, the world is so unbelievable that it makes it doubly hard to separate fact from misinformation, so the ability to check credible sources and have an interior base of knowledge is essential.”

    With no plans of retirement, Cheryl jokes that there are days when she and a fellow academic flirt with the idea of managing a convenience store or some little book nook where they can be their own bosses.  At least, I hope she is joking.  It makes me sleep better at night knowing that there is a strong, clear, and tolerant voice on campus competing with Chat GPT for the minds, hearts and souls of the next generation, entrusted to remember our history lessons.

    Tell me your life story in seven sentences or less? 

    I was born and raised in Freddy Beach. Played some soccer and some music. Had some schooling and some laughs.  Really like dead people.  Got married and became a boy mom.  Much professing.  Still love all those things.

    What is the best thing about getting older?

    Knowing who you are. You’ve figured it out. You’ve got your life partner…you’ve had your kids. You’re kind of watching them find themselves and you’re just so much more in tune with yourself… you know what makes you tick.  I know who I am in a way I was still trying to figure out when I was twenty.

    What is the worst thing about getting older?

    The lack of metabolism.  Watching various body parts expire their best before dates. Maybe in the 16th Century when we expired a little earlier…maybe that’s really what’s supposed to happen. Today whenever something starts to hurt, I don’t even hesitate, straight to physio…I’ve got coverage. I still run…I do it to run off the crazy.  I don’t even enjoy it at the time, I hate it…I run because it centers me.  I do it for how I feel afterwards.

    What would you title this chapter of your life?

    Embracing Your Inner and Outer Crone.

    If you could retain or retrieve one quality from your youth, what would it be?

    I think that I’ve retained the things that I really value.  I have a lot of  childlike joys in my life like my love of Halloween, something that I’ve carried with me from childhood, only now I have more money for animatronics. I loved playing Pokeman Go with my kids and I still play it. I am a top shelf Pokeman Go player.  I love Disney…I love The Grinch. Now I can afford like an 8 ft tall Grinch for my front yard. So, there are a lot of things that I truly loved in my childhood that I’ve carried along with me.

    I would say that I’m definitely more jaded at this point in my life.  I’m not the cock-eyed optimist of my youth.  I’m no longer thinking ‘Why can’t we all get along’ or ’surely humanity is moving in a better direction… women are getting more rights, right?’ I mean humanity is kind of losing its mind right now…its collective knowledge of things, and it may have to go and re-experience those things.  Our parents and grandparents could have told you that fascism is a bad thing… that totalitarian regimes aren’t good for the humans, but we’re seeing this resurgence of the fascist-curious, and many countries are flirting with the far right… and then hopefully pulling themselves back at the last moment because they have that collective memory.  

    What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned so far?

    Kindness.  I think kindness is the most important thing in life. That’s what makes the world go round.  Not everyone needs a lecture on the Industrial Revolution from me, but you might need a kind word, on a given day in particular.  So, leading with kindness is important to me and I would hope that my kids would get that more than anything else…to be kind to people because they need it.  We’re all going through God knows what, especially now. 

    Also, that less is more.  I’m not trying to swing for the fences anymore.  When I teach students, I’m not trying to dazzle them with every fact and statistic and every bit of my knowledge. I want to give them a basic interest and the idea that it gets more intricate the farther up they go in terms of courses and years at university, but it’s usually the simple stuff, and the basic stuff and maybe something a little funny or quirky that gets their attention, or the occasional bit of profundity if you’ve picked it up along the way…you drop that into the conversation and give them something to chew on. I always advise young academics to keep it simple, keep it entertaining, tell people a story…hook them with a good story that reveals something about humanity, and if they’re intrigued they’ll come back for more.

    Do you have a favourite quote?

    “Well behaved women seldom make history.” I think you have to be a shit-stirrer, whether you’re male or female, or gay or straight, most of the time our rights are not given to us on a silver platter. Along the way you may have to get in the streets.  The first time the government tried to turn the university into a polytechnic I took my boys with me into the streets.  I was fighting for their education and the education of all their friends.  It’s not necessarily a comfortable place for most of us… to pick up a placard and get out there, but sometimes that’s what you have to do if you want to advance the ball, especially these days when we now have to defend things that we’ve held dear for years.

    Do you have a favourite word?

    “Shit” That is my most frequently used word because shit can be a good thing, shit can be a bad thing, or it can be sort of a neutral thing like, “I don’t know shit,’ or ‘that’s some good shit,” and “that’s some baaaad shit.”  I mean really, it’s all shit…it’s truly one of the most versatile words.

    Describe your perfect day.

    I tend to think it would be some sort of turbo history nerd adventure. Some sort of haunted castle somewhere that I could explore, some backrooms that nobody else has seen.  Or it could just be a day outside with a bonfire and a bunch of guitars, friends and family and several bottles of prosecco. And I like my own company too, so sometimes a good day is when there is nobody in my house and I can have supper at 3 in the afternoon if it suits,  and if I want to stay up until 4 in the morning with the music going that’s fine too …I’m not disturbing anyone. 

    If you could have tea with anyone, real or fictional, dead, or alive, who would it be and what would you talk about?

    Well, I lost my mom quite a few years ago so it would be her. I want to catch up, so she would be my obvious first choice. Just a check in…I’m sure she does that anyway but it would be lovely to have a more productive two-way conversation.  But if it wasn’t her…I mean clearly, I’d like to have some conversations with Jesus but I’ll save that discussion for your afterlife question.  I would like to talk to certain historical figures to find out if we have things right.  I mean, I would really like to know for sure what caused the fall of Ann Boleyn. Those sorts of conversations would be pretty cool.

    Tell me three things that bring you joy.

    Knowing that my kids are becoming who they are, finding their vocation and jobs that have meaning for them. I also love my work. It’s so much fun to get into the archives and have a really good day there. Of course, there is a lot that is boring detective work as well but some days you find a great letter or something and it’s amazing.  I really love the old book smell too…it’s like a drug.  Just the idea of working in the same rooms as people like Karl Marx once did.  I also have a childlike fascination with Halloween.  The planning for Halloween 2026 is already underway.  You always need new gear, new animatronics, new costumes.  I love being scared…I love ghost stories. 

    Name a guilty pleasure.

    I don’t have a lot of guilt in my pleasures anymore.  In my 20’s I probably wouldn’t have admitted I liked some Abba songs but not now.  Things that might make people embarrassed like playing Pokeman Go or certain types of disposable pop music…you know what…if it’s a good song I’ll put it on my running mix and take it off when I get tired of it.  I’ll listen to it if it gives me pleasure. Micro pleasures are what help us survive.  My last sabbatical, my side quest was to source the perfect cup of coffee for me.  And, for me, its Jingle Java from Piccadilly coffee in Sussex. It’s seasonal, its only available around Christmas, so I literally get pounds of it and freeze it.  There is nothing about it that I identify as particularly ‘Jingly’…unless I’ve had six or seven of cups that is…and I flirt with other brands but Jingle Java is my preferred cup of coffee.  Its ruined me for pretty much everything else. 

    Do you believe in life after death? What does it look like?

    I absolutely believe in life after death. There has to be justice in the next life for some of the really bad actors. I mean I don’t think that hell will look like fire and brimstone and things like that, but I do think that there is some place of perdition if you’ve been just an absolute arsehole your entire life, that there is something nasty waiting for you in the afterlife.  I choose to believe that because if I think that people are going to escape all kinds of consequences in this life, that really bothers me a great deal.  You know conversely, I look at some people and, my god, they just can’t get a break in this life, and they’re the nicest most jubilant people and have all this joy and no reason to be joyful.  They are just a light to everyone around them.  They don’t have anything, and they would literally give you the shirt off their back.  There has to be a kind of payoff other than the good regard of those around them.  I tend to think there is something good waiting, and it might not look like various theologies tell us, maybe it looks a little bit different for everybody.  Like for me it will probably be going around interviewing all these historical figures and learning what really happened in the Russian Revolution, for example.   My heaven will be full of puppies and kitties and all kinds of critters.  I choose to believe, and if I’m wrong, I won’t know it.

    What would you like your eulogy to say?

    “That ass though.”  It’s not original, I stole it from Facebook, but I’m taking it.

  • Notes on an Afterlife

    KBJJ at Bayshore

    “I believe that when death closes our eyes we shall awaken to a light, of which our sunlight is but the shadow.”

    Albert Schopenhauer

    “Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides.”

    Lao Tzu

    I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of viewing everything I can not explain as a fraud.”

    Carl Jung

    The Old Irish say that the sea is a ‘thin space’, a place where the curtain drawn between this world and the next is porous with peepholes, where we might speak again with our dead. I walk the seacoast often with my dog and listen intently for the hushed voices of lost loved ones in the sea wet wind and crashing waves, but none have returned or spoken plainly to me, once removed from this world, having “shuffled off this mortal coil”. Where we travel to after death, if indeed we go anywhere, remains life’s penultimate mystery, the “last unprinted snow.” It’s easy enough to discount the ancient stories in an age of science that demands, peer-reviewed empirical evidence, but such an approach seems a bit rigid with so little real data available to analyze. For this LOLIW all afterlife narratives are on the examination table, until we ourselves open Schrodinger’s cat box, or coffin as it were, and discover what lies within…an endless abyss, death’s dark sea, oblivion, or a portal to an uncharted realm…perhaps a paradise.

    Whether you’re a materialist who believes consciousness dies when the brain dies, or a Dualist who understands consciousness as more than mere matter, leaving room for some notion of life after death, the unfortunate truth is that there is no real verifiable proof of either claim. While dualists might cite recurring patterns in cross-cultural qualitative studies of near death experiences, with its compelling veridical perception (reported accurate perception of events after clinical death), neuroscientists argue that oxygen deprivation and neurochemical surges are responsible for any consistency in the near-death literature. Similarly, in the case of children who report memories of previous lives, qualitative studies reveal detailed, verifiable memories, names, places and life events matching individuals unknown to these children or their families. Skeptics cite memory contamination, and investigative confirmation bias as possible explanations, but of all the stories I have read that speak to the possibility of an afterlife, I find these interviews (thousands of cases documented over decades) exceedingly interesting reading.

    Where do we go for answers to questions that science cannot resolve? To story, and philosophy of course. The Ancient Greeks believed that after death we journey to an underworld called Hades.  They placed coins in the mouths of their dead so they could pay passage to the Ferryman, a character called Charon, who sailed their souls across the River Styx. There, they were met by a three headed hell-hound named Cerberus…a gracious host to the newly arrived dead, but a savage assassin to any insipid soul who tried to return home to the land of the living. Maybe that’s why we never hear from anyone again then, after they pass over.

    Of course, the newly bereaved with their senses keened with grief will sometimes experience the odd electrical anomaly, or maybe they come upon an errant yellow balloon in the deepest wood, or some other place it has no earthly right to be…or perhaps a new birdsong on a path they’ve walked a thousand times before.  Would you believe me if I told you that when editing this essay, I closed my document to find, underneath, a dictionary look-up for the word “brother“… a word I know well…a word I have never had occasion to look up? Maybe the dead do speak to us, after a fashion, and we pass on by, unhearing. 

    The Greeks also tell of a place called Asphodel Fields, where the dead are relieved of all their living memories. I hate that part of the story, the idea of forgetting everyone I love. The final destination for the Greeks is a sort of five-star resort called Elysium or, behind door number 2, for the less than virtuous, a stint in a place called Tartarus, which I cannot recommend.  Hard labour on tap breakfast, lunch, and dinner…Myth of Sisyphus stuff.  Not wholly bad I guess…just a quick jaunt up and down Everest say, with a giant boulder strapped to you back…day in and day out ad infinitum.  You’re going to be well fit after a few decades on that plan. 

    Jumping ahead a few millennium, honourable mention must go to Nietzsche’s Theory of Eternal Recurrence. Think Groundhog Day (Bill Murray film) where you’re destined to repeat every scene of your life in the exact same sequence over and over again in a perpetual loop.  Hell of an incentive to make good life choices, isn’t it? Oatmeal or waffles… Italy or the investment portfolio…a brave life filled with great joy and heartbreak or a forever of just…alright?

    I am drawn to the notion of reincarnation.  Endless chances to get it right.  I wonder how many lives it will take me? I’m guessing a thousand or two at least. All the Eastern religions have it that we’re born back into this world to begin again the work of climbing a sort of spiritual ladder.  Eventually we reach a certain celestial plateau called “Nirvana.”  For Christians, imagine St. Peter finally opens the Pearly Gates and says, “Welcome home old bean…took you long enough!

    If Heaven is invite-only, then I imagine Purgatory ( a Catholic intermediary world ) must be a pretty packed pre-party… standing room only…non-redeemable sinners not welcome.  I envision impromptu break out self-help rooms…’Gossipers are us’, or all those with Fear and Self-Loathing please line up here.  But I guess that only tracks if you buy into a heaven and hell dialectic…right? For my part, I believe we make our own heaven and hell right here on Earth. A state of mind really, isn’t it, with your own conscience acting as judge and jury.

    I mean ‘with our thoughts we make the world’.  That’s what Buddha says anyway. And if I have to jump on anyone’s spiritual soapbox, it’s always going to be the Buddhist’s …they had me at karma…all that radical acceptance of what is, mastery of the self, end of suffering stuff. Of course there is no real escape from suffering.  Buddhism just helps you accept it as an indispensable part of the life package.  And maybe, if we endure our slice of suffering with a bit of grace, we get to skip a few grades in the school for misfit souls… who knows?

    But for my money, the best book on death and the afterlife is The Upanishads, a collection of ancient wisdom teachings dating back to the 2th century BC.   The title is Sanskrit for, “sit down closely.”  It’s basically a user’s manual on how to get to the next level of the spiritual plain.  Coles notes, it says we each arrive with a little spark of the divine inside us and our job while we’re here is to figure out our duty or dharma and to perform it with good intention.  Dickens said it best, ‘mankind was my business’.  Anyway, if we get it right, it’s rumoured we can liberate ourselves from the endless cycle of death and rebirth.

    Sounds simple enough…right? The key to it all is embedded in an ancient Sanskrit mantra, ‘Tat tram asi’.  It means ‘Thou art that.’ It’s a call to remember who we truly are…ancient, sacred, luminous beings, connected to the divine and to each other, like a string of lights on a Christmas tree.  Collectively capable of conjuring a breathtaking light…unspeakable beauty.

    Essentially the life we think we’re living is really just a dream…underneath we’re all actually these sacred spiritual luminous beings…indescribably beautiful, and unbreakably bound, never alone, each of us an essential piece of an endless intricate, forgotten web far grander than ourselves alone. I mean, how do you forget a thing like that?  Are we all just sleepwalking through our lives …plugged in to the Matrix?

    But don’t worry, legend has it that you can wake up from the dream any time you wish to Sleeping Beauty.  Meditation is the best wake-up pill I’ve found so far. I mean trauma and personal tragedy work too, but I can’t recommend them.  Memory can only be rekindled from within, and only when you’re ready but ideally it comes in time for you to summit the proverbial seven story mountain… to ascend the spritual spiral staircase.

    I know what you’re thinking…what I’d really like, if I’m honest… is just a teeny, tiny, little smidgen of irrefutable proof…before I start the chanting, or maybe just a bit more detail on what actually happens to us after we breathe our last breath. You want the science. I get it. I’m convinced science will get there in the end…of that I have great faith.  I mean we already have proof that we come from the stars, and that every single atom we interact with, including each other was forged in the stars.  We’re stardust you and I.

    Who knows…maybe we don’t actually go anywhere, when the lights go out… maybe we stay right here. Einstein said E=mc2…matter becomes energy and vice-versa and when you add up all the energy available at any given second, the sum of that energy remains constant.  Nothing is ever really created or destroyed, only transformed.

    Or consider String Theory. Essentially it proposes that the basic particles that make up our universe are little loops of vibrating strings.  When scientists look at these loops at the subatomic level, it seems the number of directions to travel in may be well beyond the 3D movie we’ve been watching all our lives.  What if in the unseen world of quantum mechanics there are multiple dimensions operating all at once… multiverses? Maybe when we die the end of the tunnel isn’t heaven or hell, but an alternate universe remarkably similar to the one we just left. I mean, that would go a long way to explaining the sensation of déjà vu, and precognition…that feeling when you meet someone for the first time, or enter a room you’ve never visited, coupled with a strong sense of having met or been in that place before.

    To say nothing of quantum entanglement. The fascinating phenomenon where scientists can show that two subatomic particles, us, in our smallest selves, are linked somehow, even if separated by billions of light years of space.  That means a mere flutter of your eyelashes can make a molecule inside a star at the edge of the universe quiver in response. What does it prove? It means we have reach…it means we can talk to the stars across the universe…it means “there are more things in Heaven and Earth Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.“

    What do I choose to believe? Where do we go when we die? I’m not convinced we die at all, only our bodies, our temporary meat suits, not our real selves, the part of us that has no name. Perhaps our dead are here with us still…it’s only that they ‘walk invisible’ for a time. Thich Nhat Hahn calls it Inter-being, the idea that everything is connected, dependent and interwoven. Rather than imagining the afterlife as a location, Hahn suggests your life is like a ripple in a pond, even after the individual drop disappears beneath the surface, the ripples continue to spread. “Death is a transformation, not annihilation.”

    It comforts me to think of my loved ones as only waiting for me somewhere…just a string’s length away, but the fact that I’m comforted by such a story, does not necessarily disqualify it. I cannot tell you how the light comes for us, only that I believe that it does…that it will. If we were forged in the same star, you and me, my dear family and friends, then I believe we are entangled for all time. When I leave this place, I hope to become part of the light that arrives at some appointed time for you when you awake from your dream, and until that day, I’ll be waiting patiently somewhere not too far way, to welcome you home.