Elysium

Every  walk of people has its myths. From the origins of life itself to what awaits a person after death. Every civilization, religion and race has it's own unique, yet strikingly similar ideas. Creation ex nihlio is a very common motif it origin mythoi from the Bible to the Quran, from Taoism to animistic cultures around the world, from ancient Egypt to the Rig Verda, they all tell the story a little differently, but the world was still created from nothing, chaos, or a void.

However what is more culturally telling than the origin or creation myth, is what they believe happens after death. It is more revealing than a group of peoples belief in their own noble origins. It is more exposing than any explanation of natural phenomenon. It is the hopes, the dreams and the fears of an entire group of people. Christian based faiths weren't the first and won't be the last to dream up the idea of a heaven and hell.

Ancient Greece and Greco-Roman pagans believed in a heaven and hell of sorts. The underworld is made up of parts from the deep depths for the vilest of villains, Tartarus to the Isles of  the blessed or the Elysian fields, where the select few are rewarded with eternal life and the paradise for those deserving. Elysium is the example of paradise found in may modern religions and faiths. A paradise for those that leave this world, a hope of some existence after death.

A hundred years is a very short time in the grand scheme of things let alone fifty or thirty. A coworker died last night at fifty years of age. Though I was raised in the church and know the ins and outs of heaven and hell I can't quite bring myself to believe in an afterlife, yet at the same time I hope desperately that I'm wrong. There are people I would love to see again, people I wish to meet for the first time and people who left this world too young that I hope desperately have a second act, who have a chance to live.

I don't know what awaits after death, probably nothing. Yet if I knew some how I would see the first and last man I really loved again I could forgive myself for my mistakes. If I knew I would meet my namesake one day, I could listen to my mothers stories about my great-grandmother without an ache in my chest. If I knew that someday my coworker would one day be reunited with her family and the ones she loves I could fall asleep, at peace with the fact that fifty was way too young for her to die.