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When she woke next morning, I said, "Let me tell you about your dream."
"What dream?" she said.
"The one meeting us hi the house you designed."
"Richard!" she said, "I remember! Let me tell you about it! It was a glorious place, deer in the meadow, the pond was a mirror for a field of flowers like we had in Oregon. The design, the solar house will work! There was music inside, and books and trees ... so open and light! It was a beautiful bright-color day and there were Dolly and Angel looking at us, purring back to sleep, fat old cats. I saw the new book, our book, on the shelf!"
"Yes? Yes? What was the title? Say!"
She struggled to remember. "Wookie, I'm so sorry! It's gone. . . ."
"Oh, well. Don't feel bad," I said. "Silly curiosity. Quite a dream, don't you think?"
"It was something about forever."
forty-seven
I FINISHED reading Recollections of Death
one evening shortly after she started Life After Life, and the more I thought, the more I needed to talk with her.
"When you have a minute," I said. "Long minute."
She read on to the end of her paragraph and folded the dust-jacket over her page to mark it.
"OK," she said.
"Does it strike you wrong," I said, "does it strike you wrong that dying is most often a messy sort of inconvenient bother, for most people, something that jumps on us maybe just when we've found the one person in the world we love, we want never to be separated from her even for a day, and death says I don't care I'm going to rip you apart?"
"That has struck me from time to time," she said.
"Why does dying have to be that way? Why should we give our consent to such an out-of-control death?"
"Maybe because the only other choice is suicide," she said.
"Aha!" I said. "Is suicide the only choice? Isn't there a better way of leaving than this random last-minute dying-by-force custom they have on this planet?"
"Let me guess," she said. "You have a plan that you are about to propose? First you ought to know that as long as you're here, I'm not all that unhappy with dying at the last minute."
"Wait till you hear this. Because this is going to appeal to your sense of order: Why, instead of surprise-dying, don't people reach a time when they decide, 'Done! We've finished everything we came to do, there are no mountains that we haven't pretty well climbed, nothing unlearned we wanted to learn, we've lived a nice life,' and then in perfect health why don't they just sit down, two of them under a tree or a star, and lift themselves out of their bodies and never come back?"
"Like in the books we're reading," she said. "What a nice idea! But we don't ... we don't do it because we don't know how to do it."
"Leslie!" I said, full of my plan, "/ know how!"
"Not just yet, please," she said. "We've got to build our house, and there are the cats and the raccoons to think of, and the milk in the refrigerator will g
et sour and the mail has to be answered; we're just getting started again."
"OK. Not yet. But it struck me, reading near-death experiences, they're the same as the out-of-body experiences in the astral-travel books! Dying is nothing more than an out-of-body, from which we don't return! And out-of-bodies, they can be learned!"
"Hold on a minute," she said. "You're suggesting we
choose a pretty sunset and leave our bodies and not bother to come back?"
"Someday, yes."
She looked at me sideways. "How much of you is serious?"
