I started this thread by referring to Hamlet. Have any of you seen, or better yet, read Hamlet? I read it very carefully when I decided to write a very short, simplified version of this play for my students, a version that would lay bare the essential conflicts and drama of this play. I found that this play is so very, very much about death. Oh, it is about revenge too, of course, and about deceit, and about Hamlet's hatred of his uncle, and about his cowering before his task of having to kill his uncle, the King of Denmark, representative through his lofty office of God on Earth. And it is about Hamlet's hatred of his mother for her betrayal of his father, and about his ensuing revulsion of Ophelia. But most of all, it is about death. It is about the fear and horror and sadness and loss and grief of death. And it is about the complete uncertainty of what comes after death. In his famous "To be or not to be" monologue, Hamlet says:

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To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.
What happens after death? We don't know. Hamlet tells himself that he would really like to commit suicide, but he dares not for fear of what will happen afterwards. And when Hamlet finally dies - not because he has committed suicide, which was considered a mortal sin during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but because he has been murdered, it is still not certain that he will go to paradise. This is what Hamlet's good friend Horatio says at the moment of Hamlet's death:

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"Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!"
This sounds peaceful, but it doesn't necessarily mean that Hamlet is going to enjoy the happiness of Heaven. It could mean only that the sorrows of life is over for him.

Unlike Hamlet, I don't believe that we will be plagued by horrible dreams after death, dreams that we can't wake up from. I believe that there is nothing after death. Of course I may be completely wrong about that, but still, that's what I believe. And because I believe that there is nothing after death, that makes death, particularly premature death, a very big deal for me.

I grew up in a very religious home. I was given all sorts of religious children's books when I was a kid. A sub-genre among the religious books were the stories about good little religious girls who died and went to heaven. Another sub-genre were the stories about good little religious boys who were saved by God so that they could live out their lives here on Earth. Both these stories were supposed to be equally educational and uplifting: the girls who died and went to heaven and the boys who survived and lived out their lives on the Earth. Both these kind of stories were supposed to be equally demonstrative of God's love for humanity and for children. But all I could see was that the little girls died, that their lives were taken from them, that God wouldn't protect their lives here on Earth, and that I wasn't even allowed to feel truly bad that the girls were dead. Oh, I was allowed to cry at their deaths, of course, but afterwards I was supposed to smile through my tears and feel happy and good that the little girls were in heaven. Bottom line, I was told that I shouldn't really grieve when a girl died. I should grieve a little at first, and then I should feel happy.

And on Sundays, I put coins in the collection-box that was shaped like a little African boy, to remind me and everyone else to save the little boys of Africa. Because boys were meant to live.

And if there are significantly more Lois deathfics than Clark deathfics, then that suggests to me that I should smile through my tears at Lois's death, just like I was asked to smile through my tears at the little Christian girls' deaths. But I shouldn't have to imagine Clark's death, just like I wasn't asked to imagine the deaths of little boys in the educational children's stories I was reading.

Ann