Let's write about the afterlife!
This delightful essay about the Jeopardy game show host Ken Jennings and his book titled "100 things to see after you die", is written by the Chicago writer, Nicholas Cannariato, published in The Washington Post.
GLENDALE, California. — Forest Lawn cemetery here is the final resting place for many of the boldest boldface names in entertainment history, including Jimmy Stewart, Walt Disney, Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor and Sammy Davis Jr. It’s also the place Ken Jennings happened to visit for the first time on the day he found out Alex Trebek had died.
I met Jennings at the cemetery on a sunny April day to talk about his new book, which is all about the afterlife. If that sounds unexpected, it all started at an airport bookstore. “I saw one of those bucket list travel books,” he said. “I was looking at it upside down, and I thought it said ‘A Thousand Destinations to Die Before You See.’ I came out of the bookstore and I told my friends at the gate, ‘I think I have an idea for a book.’”
The idea would become “100 Places to See After You Die,” which Scribner is publishing Tuesday. In it, the “Jeopardy!” host — and the show’s all-time winningest champion — surveys ideas from around the world about what happens to us after we die. It’s written in the form of a travel guide, with an eclectic mix of 100 accounts, ranging from mythology and religion to ideas floated in books, movies and TV shows. In the introduction, Jennings suggests that readers dip in and out of the book, consulting it as a “post-bucket list.”
I met Jennings at the cemetery on a sunny April day to talk about his new book, which is all about the afterlife. If that sounds unexpected, it all started at an airport bookstore. “I saw one of those bucket list travel books,” he said. “I was looking at it upside down, and I thought it said ‘A Thousand Destinations to Die Before You See.’ I came out of the bookstore and I told my friends at the gate, ‘I think I have an idea for a book.’”
The idea would become “100 Places to See After You Die,” which Scribner is publishing Tuesday. In it, the “Jeopardy!” host — and the show’s all-time winningest champion — surveys ideas from around the world about what happens to us after we die. It’s written in the form of a travel guide, with an eclectic mix of 100 accounts, ranging from mythology and religion to ideas floated in books, movies and TV shows. In the introduction, Jennings suggests that readers dip in and out of the book, consulting it as a “post-bucket list.”
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| “Whatever the end is, whether it exists or not, that’s got the meaning of life in it,” Ken Jennings said. (Christina Gandolfo for The Washington Post) |
Threaded throughout are comic asides and passing insights in the form of information boxes with headings such as “Meet the Locals,” “When to Go,” “Best to Avoid,” “Time-Savers” and “Off the Beaten Path.” The book’s tone is light and irreverent, sometimes bordering on shticky. But ultimately it reads a lot like what you expect in a book by Jennings: long on knowledge and mercifully short on claims about the grand truth of things.
“The miracle of life and consciousness seems already so unusual to me that it seems like such a waste if that all just sparks for some shorter time and then vanishes,” Jennings said. “We would love to believe that that’s not true and that it’s not just such a brief flowering. Of course, the other attractive thing about it is that we’re never going to know.”
Jennings has been interested in death and the afterlife for as long as he can remember. Part of his interest when he was a child stemmed from the fact that he hadn’t yet experienced any deeply personal losses. “And so,” he said, “a lot of my formative experiences with death were fictional characters, like Spock dying, Mr. Hooper dying, Jean Grey from the X-Men. That’s the kind of American experience with death. You talk about it more with Big Bird than with your own loved ones sometimes.”
Jennings describes himself as “a generalist who loves knowing a tiny bit about a million things.” The book stems from his interest in how “people’s ideas about their own culture and priorities change” based on how they see the next world.
Of course, how exactly one sees the afterlife is tricky. In the book, Jennings nods, if only obliquely, to the elephant in the room: The afterlife is the speculation of living people who, you know, haven’t died before. He expresses skepticism with dollops of dry wit, which can feel reflexive but do usefully lighten some very serious, even grim material.
Take, for instance, Islam’s version of hell, Jahannam, which is similar to other hells. Jennings describes it as “a series of vast rings” in a “crater on the underside of the world,” consisting of “seven different layers of torture, called Inferno, Blaze, Flame, Furnace, Fire, Hellfire, and Abyss.” He walks readers through the process that might end in a stay there: “Don’t be alarmed when two blue-black beings with red eyes and terrifying tusks appear to you in the grave. These are the angels Munkar and Nakir, and they’ve come to ask you three questions: ‘Who is your God?,’ ‘What is your religion?,’ and ‘Who is your prophet?’ We recommend going with ‘Allah,’ ‘Islam,’ and ‘Muhammad’ as your answers here.”
Heaven in Islam is called Jannah, which means “garden” or “paradise.” Jennings observes how “most traditional heavens are bright and sunny,” but in Jannah things are more sensuous: “There are aromatic rains of rosewater, while all the cooling water you can drink bubbles up from springs smelling of camphor and ginger.”
But the afterlife is also about our need for abiding connection. Jennings said that part of what motivates his own hopes for it is possible reunion with the people he’s known and loved. “When you think about what you can take with you,” he said, “it’s clearly not material things. But it might be the relationships you have. I would like to think that that continues.” There might not be anything more human than feeling that our bonds with each other are eternal.
Jennings does some of his most entertaining writing in the less-devout sections of the book: those that address how literature, movies and TV have dealt with the subject. One example is his (most excellent) account of the movie “Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey.” To escape Death in the movie, Jennings writes, you can give him a “melvin, which is a most egregious type of wedgie,” or “you’ll need to challenge Death to a contest, like the game of chess from Bergman’s ‘The Seventh Seal’ — and win. Be warned that Death has only been defeated once — and he was a super-poor sport about it.”
Another conception of the afterlife from Hollywood is even more surprising: Iowa. In “Field of Dreams,” long-dead baseball players emerge from cornfields to play again with the living. Even if the well-rendered schmaltz of the movie is too much for some palates, credit where credit is due: The vast openness of Iowa’s landscape is an inspired choice for a portal to the beyond.
I asked Jennings if his faith — he’s a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — informed his thoughts about the subject. He said that “coming from a Latter-day Saint background, there’s a real emphasis on [the idea that] even the afterlife has growth — that it’s not just a static cloud, but that you could still learn things and do things.” To him, it’s an attractive part of the faith, “that the afterlife is not just a reward. It’s not just the dessert, but there’s something to do and places to go.”
That’s in part why he chose to write his book in the form of a travel guide, since such books are all about “the vibe of a place,” he said. “You’re trying to convey not just what time the bars close or how regular the buses are, but you’re really trying to convey what you know, what is the spirit of the place that you can’t get at home. And I guess that’s exactly what’s implicit in how we think about God, too. What can you get from him that you can’t get from your loved ones, your king, your boss, your favorite YouTuber? Must be something. Or else, why God?”
Which is to say that religion is important in his life, but more in the present moment than for reasons having to do with the hereafter. Jennings consults it, he said, as a way to wonder: “What kind of person am I going to be today? I think that might be unusual, for a religious person to tell you that. I should be fixated on my heavenly reward maybe, but I’m not. Maybe that’s a sign of a less robust or certain faith.”
Writing the book has changed him, too. “Years and years of working on this book,” he said, “and the funny thing is, I now find myself thinking about the afterlife all the time. Whatever the end is, whether it exists or not, that’s got the meaning of life in it.”
The cemetery was closing as Jennings and I walked back to our cars. There was a sense of an ending. It was only for a short time, in a place of the dead, talking eternity with the king of earthly knowledge, but I felt there was a serenity to our conversation.
“The miracle of life and consciousness seems already so unusual to me that it seems like such a waste if that all just sparks for some shorter time and then vanishes,” Jennings said. “We would love to believe that that’s not true and that it’s not just such a brief flowering. Of course, the other attractive thing about it is that we’re never going to know.”
Jennings has been interested in death and the afterlife for as long as he can remember. Part of his interest when he was a child stemmed from the fact that he hadn’t yet experienced any deeply personal losses. “And so,” he said, “a lot of my formative experiences with death were fictional characters, like Spock dying, Mr. Hooper dying, Jean Grey from the X-Men. That’s the kind of American experience with death. You talk about it more with Big Bird than with your own loved ones sometimes.”
Jennings describes himself as “a generalist who loves knowing a tiny bit about a million things.” The book stems from his interest in how “people’s ideas about their own culture and priorities change” based on how they see the next world.
Of course, how exactly one sees the afterlife is tricky. In the book, Jennings nods, if only obliquely, to the elephant in the room: The afterlife is the speculation of living people who, you know, haven’t died before. He expresses skepticism with dollops of dry wit, which can feel reflexive but do usefully lighten some very serious, even grim material.
Take, for instance, Islam’s version of hell, Jahannam, which is similar to other hells. Jennings describes it as “a series of vast rings” in a “crater on the underside of the world,” consisting of “seven different layers of torture, called Inferno, Blaze, Flame, Furnace, Fire, Hellfire, and Abyss.” He walks readers through the process that might end in a stay there: “Don’t be alarmed when two blue-black beings with red eyes and terrifying tusks appear to you in the grave. These are the angels Munkar and Nakir, and they’ve come to ask you three questions: ‘Who is your God?,’ ‘What is your religion?,’ and ‘Who is your prophet?’ We recommend going with ‘Allah,’ ‘Islam,’ and ‘Muhammad’ as your answers here.”
Heaven in Islam is called Jannah, which means “garden” or “paradise.” Jennings observes how “most traditional heavens are bright and sunny,” but in Jannah things are more sensuous: “There are aromatic rains of rosewater, while all the cooling water you can drink bubbles up from springs smelling of camphor and ginger.”
But the afterlife is also about our need for abiding connection. Jennings said that part of what motivates his own hopes for it is possible reunion with the people he’s known and loved. “When you think about what you can take with you,” he said, “it’s clearly not material things. But it might be the relationships you have. I would like to think that that continues.” There might not be anything more human than feeling that our bonds with each other are eternal.
Jennings does some of his most entertaining writing in the less-devout sections of the book: those that address how literature, movies and TV have dealt with the subject. One example is his (most excellent) account of the movie “Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey.” To escape Death in the movie, Jennings writes, you can give him a “melvin, which is a most egregious type of wedgie,” or “you’ll need to challenge Death to a contest, like the game of chess from Bergman’s ‘The Seventh Seal’ — and win. Be warned that Death has only been defeated once — and he was a super-poor sport about it.”
Another conception of the afterlife from Hollywood is even more surprising: Iowa. In “Field of Dreams,” long-dead baseball players emerge from cornfields to play again with the living. Even if the well-rendered schmaltz of the movie is too much for some palates, credit where credit is due: The vast openness of Iowa’s landscape is an inspired choice for a portal to the beyond.
I asked Jennings if his faith — he’s a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — informed his thoughts about the subject. He said that “coming from a Latter-day Saint background, there’s a real emphasis on [the idea that] even the afterlife has growth — that it’s not just a static cloud, but that you could still learn things and do things.” To him, it’s an attractive part of the faith, “that the afterlife is not just a reward. It’s not just the dessert, but there’s something to do and places to go.”
That’s in part why he chose to write his book in the form of a travel guide, since such books are all about “the vibe of a place,” he said. “You’re trying to convey not just what time the bars close or how regular the buses are, but you’re really trying to convey what you know, what is the spirit of the place that you can’t get at home. And I guess that’s exactly what’s implicit in how we think about God, too. What can you get from him that you can’t get from your loved ones, your king, your boss, your favorite YouTuber? Must be something. Or else, why God?”
Which is to say that religion is important in his life, but more in the present moment than for reasons having to do with the hereafter. Jennings consults it, he said, as a way to wonder: “What kind of person am I going to be today? I think that might be unusual, for a religious person to tell you that. I should be fixated on my heavenly reward maybe, but I’m not. Maybe that’s a sign of a less robust or certain faith.”
Writing the book has changed him, too. “Years and years of working on this book,” he said, “and the funny thing is, I now find myself thinking about the afterlife all the time. Whatever the end is, whether it exists or not, that’s got the meaning of life in it.”
The cemetery was closing as Jennings and I walked back to our cars. There was a sense of an ending. It was only for a short time, in a place of the dead, talking eternity with the king of earthly knowledge, but I felt there was a serenity to our conversation.
Yet throughout, he kept getting phone calls. He was polite and apologetic about them, but whatever they were about, they seemed urgent. Acutely aware of our surroundings, I didn’t ask who it was.
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| ncannariato@gmail.com. |
Nicholas Cannariato is a writer and teacher in Chicago.
For more information check out the List of 12 Famous People Buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park by Minda Powers-Douglas, BA in English
Labels: Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Ken Jennings, Nicholas Cannariato, The Washington Post
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