everyone has an afterlife

Yesterday I went to the cemetery with Gabi and Mamitza to pull weeds to make the graves of Mamaitza's parents look kept. Monday is a big holiday and everyone goes to the cemeteries and remembers their dead, and the graves need to be pretty for the big day.
I also attended a funeral this week, of one of my fellow teacher's mother-in-law, and someone I know in America has a close friend who is dying. No one really knows what happens after we take our last breath besides the fact that we're 21 grams lighter. Actually, no one knows what will happen in the next hour, day, week or year, but at least we have boundaries for what will happen(grass will stay green, male penguins will still huddle over their eggs and a cup of coffee in the morning will always sound nice).
But we don't know the boundaries to the afterlife. And what we don't know about, we imagine.

The Afterlife
by Billy Collins

They're moving off in all imaginable directions,
each according to his own private belief,
and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal:
that everyone is right, as it turns out.
you go to the place you always thought you would go,
the place you kept lit in an alcove in your head.

Some are being shot into a funnel of flashing colors
into a zone of light, white as a January sun.
Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits
with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other.

Some have already joined the celestial choir
and are singing as if they have been doing this forever,
while the less inventive find themselves stuck
in a big air conditioned room full of food and chorus girls.

Some are approaching the apartment of the female God,
a woman in her forties with short wiry hair
and glasses hanging from her neck by a string.
With one eye she regards the dead through a hold in her door.

There are those we are squeezing into the bodies
of animals - eagles and leopards - and one trying on
the skin of a monkey like a tight suit,
ready to begin another life in a more simple key,

while others float off into some benign vagueness,
little units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere.

There are even a few classicists being led to an underworld
by a mythological creature with a beard and hooves.
He will bring them to the mouth of the furious cave
guarded over by Edith Hamilton and her three-headed dogs.

The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins
wishing they could return so they could learn Italian
or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain.
They wish they could wake in the morning like you
and stand at a window examining the winter trees,
every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.


I do not imagine lying on my back in a coffin wishing to still be breathing, but I do imagine lying on my back in a meadow during springtime, maybe watching the world below and God above. For sure sun and breezy summer warmth will somehow be involved.
what do you imagine?