Do not enter.  Here, behind the stainless steel doors, in secret places, unknown persons, “Authorized Persons” we do not want to know, commit unspeakable desecrations of the temple from which the spirit has vanished. The sacred is profaned. The sacrosanct is violated.  Any remaining questions are resolved by the incision on the chest reading “Y”. It offers the answer “because…” Because of thousands of reasons that lead to the universal and non-optional conclusion: It all just stopped working. System overload; The End.
With an almost alien clinical detachment, benumbed practitioners process one’s remains, proportionally to the resources available, and expended. They’ll do what they can, depending on how much you want and can afford. For a pauper, for a prince; for a price that’s nice.  Fluid change, preservatives in, make-up, hair, wardrobe, the encore closing curtain call in a flip-top box. Or perhaps the simple demure gray ashes in an urn after you finally quit smoking.  Arrangements.  The gathering of the related and sympathetic. The choreographed ritual. Quite appropriately dark morose suits and dresses. Sincerely long faced clichés. “All part of the plan”. Songs and prayerful magic words go drifting into space. We trouble deaf heaven with our bootless cries into a void, and look at one another clinging to the gossamer thread of life, that evaporates before our tearful and terrorized eyes. We know; we too will make that journey to the undiscovered country.
“This is the dead land. This is the cactus land. Here the stone images are raised. Here they receive the supplication of a dead man’s hand under the twinkle of a fading star.”* Hallowed ancestral grounds of the predeceased are tended by the mindful and avoided by the fearful and guilty, desecrated by the mindless and angry vandals. As we trespass through the gates into the necropolis we really don’t know what specter, what vision, may manifest itself. The wind through the branches and the rustling leaves scattering at our feet whisper to us with the voices of the spirits passed: “Get Out!”  We want to see what we don’t want to see; show us a sign. Give us some evidence that there really is something beyond, but please, not the tortured vengeful souls of an endless inferno where deserved punishment for our closeted sins awaits us. We are not prepared for a revelation.
Let’s get out of here. We don’t belong here. It’s just our imagination messing with our rational minds. Come on, It’s just a bunch of hocus-pocus mythology.
Or is it?  What if…….

* T.S. Elliot: The Hollow Men.