My Dear Friends,
As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, I know that my race is run. Twilight looms. And so I wish to write my own obituary rather than have someone else put out platitudes about me after I die—in the usual, banal spirit of Dic-nihil-sed-bonum-de-morto. Let me call this my “valebituary”: a valedictory-cum-obituary, addressed to all who have known me and touched my life in many ways.
It’s been a fascinating ride. In terms of money and possessions, it’s been a net-zero life: Penniless I came in, and penniless do I go out. But from ingress to exit it’s been one splendid journey into the unknown. After seven decades, I’m now the longest-lived male of my family in recent generations. I’ve had a peripatetic and satisfying life, and I’m content—especially because I lived it mostly on my own terms. You too should enjoy your life while you can, and celebrate all your accomplishments. Life is for living; it’s not an austere apprenticeship for a mythical after-death. You won’t get another shot at it—ever!
I am content that my progeny are off to a viable start in their own leg of the relay of life. I couldn’t wish for more. My Nigerian hometown is Umunakanu; it means Children will surpass their forebears, and I expect my sons and their offspring to exceed my longevity and carry our family banner into the future. Life is an unending relay race. Genetics tells us that a living organism—whether a virus, a plant, or a human being—is merely a vessel to transmit the genes of its lineage to future generations. I strove in life to understand my sons and provide for them better than my Papa did for his children; I am confident my sons will do even more for their own children. That’s the spirit of “Umunakanu.”
Dying, like being born, is an intensely personal thing. My family will dispose of my remains privately. Afterwards, they will announce my death, if they so wish. A memorial gathering of my friends will be okay, but I trust my sons to allow no religious/superstitious gobbledygook in my memory. Those who really knew me know I left the whole Jesus farce way back in teenage. When I realized that the vaunted emperor of the skies—far from being clad in magnificent raiment—was really butt-naked, I rejected the mental slavery that is religion. It is the sophomoric myth of Stone-Age people who knew little. Our primitive forebears speculated darkly and wildly because they lacked the means to understand life. These days we have ample means to interrogate nature intelligently.
And we are getting correct answers all the time—but not from sky fairies or their white-collared agents down here on earth. Befuddled by mysticism, believers tell us that “heaven” is the abode of ultimate glory. They have no idea how nearly correct they are. All they need to do is take off their blinkers and look up to behold the infinite majesty of the real, physical heavens as they are disclosed to us, hourly these days, via the secular wizardry of science. But the unfathomable heavens of the Hubble telescope are not places one can reach by dying—or wishing and chanting! Believing in sky fairies is not bad per se: children grow up with no manifest harm from their days of anticipating Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. What is despicable is wielding your fairies as a club to coerce other people into living their lives according to your dictates; that’s what religion does.
When I die my offspring will eschew silly euphemisms about my having “passed” to a mythical place up above. Such places do not exist. After millennia of strident proclamations — from the long era of ignorance to the present age of quantum leaps in progress — no such place has been found, nor will one ever be found. Neither rapturous incantation nor hysterical affirmation can ever conjure it into being. And every “believer” knows this for sure: Even as millions of people risk life and limb to rush to presumed comfort in the USA and Europe, not one person is eager to rush to heaven—which is touted as the abode of ultimate happiness and glory! But then, hypocrisy and contradiction never did deter religiosity!
True, most people still espouse weird beliefs, from Voodoo to Christianity to Scientology. While we each have the right to delude ourselves with superstitious nonsense about fairies in the sky or in a supposed “afterlife,” there is something extra-obnoxious about adherents of the two most noisy religions—Christianity and Islam. Though they remain a demographic minority in our world today, they nonetheless strive strenuously, by means fair or foul, to impose the dictates of their outlandish beliefs on the lives of everyone—believers and non-believers alike. Starting with children, they scare weak-willed people into conformity, with threats of terrible retribution here in life and after death. The consequences, cascading down the past twenty centuries of history, have been upheavals and tension wherever those two religions have held sway.
A consequence for me personally is that I’m not just indifferent to religion: I detest it. No other social institution stirs up revulsion in me as much as religion. Like everybody who was educated in the Western tradition, I was coerced into the mythology of Jesus Crap. In early adulthood I decided there was nothing in those myths but I went along still, in order to get along. But by the time I matured as a senior citizen I had had enough, and began to pare down my circle of associates, friends, and even relatives—having concluded that those who cling hysterically to mysticism even in adulthood are incorrigibly deluded. I needed to quarantine myself from such people, and living in seclusion (or even loneliness) was an acceptable price to pay for the tranquility of being spared idiotic debates about the existence of fairies in the sky.
Fear of death is visceral, and primordial. It overwhelms reason and foments irrational longing in us for eternal life—for a place to go when we die and a mythical superman to administer it. Religion stokes and milks this fear, with the false promise to adherents that they will transcend death. As the end begins to loom on my horizon it would be soothing for me to pretend, “This old man goes rolling home.” But the unglamorous reality is that when people die they LEAVE home, forever.
The long and debilitating reign of godism and other superstitions is over. Anyone who seriously doubts this should take a simple challenge. Put your money where your mouth is: Bet your life on your god and forego scientific medicine next time you are ill. Nowadays doctors are able to heal or manage maladies that defied humans since antiquity. “God” used to cure them down the millennia through “miracles.” But not anymore, now that skeptics are alert and have ample scientific tools to debunk claims of miracle and virgins appearing in the sky. So goddists now rationalize their beliefs by saying “God works through doctors.” Bull shit! The irony of that excuse escapes gullible people: A god who can only work through human agency is redundant—he is really a sham! The very idea of it is an oxymoron. The truth is that gods are dead: thousands of gods have come and gone since humans learned to think. Now the future belongs to reason and science, fully and inexorably. I do consider it a major achievement of mine to have shielded my children and grandchildren from the stultifying funk of religious twaddle. UBI SCIENTIA IBI VERITAS!
But the main reason for this final message is to express sincere appreciation to my family and friends, and my acquaintances. Perhaps you and I chanced to meet, greet, shake hands or chat—or even argue. Or maybe we partook of a drink or meal together—or otherwise interacted at some point along the trajectory of my life. If so you helped to create the final product I became. I thank you for it. That applies also to the Catholic missionaries whose boarding schools gave my life an early forum for the acquisition of knowledge—notwithstanding their great obfuscation with Jesus-Christ malarkey. And it applies most specially to Margaret, my wife of half a century. In spite of our differences over her superstitious beliefs and my lack thereof, she was the main prop in my struggle to reach whatever goals I attained in my life.
I have lived my final years off the grid. That seclusion brought control and serenity to my life. Life slows down to embrace sanity when we eschew the noise and bustle of the madding crowd.
As-salaamu aleikum!
Linus Uzodimma Joseph Thomas-Ogbuji
December, 2020