One of my various vain 17 year old insights is that nothing is really black-and-white like people make it out to be- everything is a spectrum. There's no point, for example, where you stop becoming a boy and become a man, its more of a process that you never really finish. It's a matter of degree- at one point in your life you are very childish, and then you grow more or less childish over the course of your life. I think death is kinda like that- rather, existence is like that. On the spectrum of existence, living is on one very far extreme and death is on the other. You started off very, very dead, when you were swimming in your dad's testicle, or even before that when you were just some fiber or piece of protein somewhere; and then you became more alive, when you sat in the womb, and you became more alive, when you were born; and at some point your body checks out and you become very dead again. That means that at some point in the very, very far future, the Earth would explode and you would become more dead, or we might figure out how to bring people back to live and you would become significantly less dead. So there's no real distinction between the point we're you're dead, and when you're alive, besides a matter of degree, of intensity of your existence. You never stop existing- matter cannot be destroyed, but you CAN come damn close.
To clarify; people see life and death as black and white, you simply cannot be both, but I don't think that's true. At any point in the process of dying, who can say whether or not you're dead? If I behead somebody, and the head still thinks for a while, I challenge you to pinpoint the exact instant in time in which that head stopped living and became dead. You can't; it's impossible. If somebody dies the old fashioned way, are they dead when they close their eyes, or when they stop breathing, or when their heart stops? Even if their heart is stopped, all the cells in their body probably have ample oxygen to exist for a few more billionths of a second- and not all the cells die at the same rate. How many of your cells have to die for you to be very dead? Nobody knows. All we DO know is that I, right now, am very alive; and at some point in the future I will be very dead, and you can randomly draw a line in the sand for what's alive and what's dead, but it's random. To draw an analogy that we all know- Overused is above 3.41% or whatever the number is, and Underused is below that; but that's just a random number we made up because it's pretty and we like it and we NEEDED a number so that we know what alive or dead or overused or underused, but this concept of harsh distinctions, of black and white, is completely false. The difference, of course, is that the chart of usage for something BL like Staraptor would be "hilly", and have far less severe curves than the graph of my aliveness, which would essentially by a straight, horizontal line, followed by a sharp portion of the graph with a slope of -999 or whatever, followed by another horizontal straight line- but even so, is it at 76 years, 11 months, 13 days, 15 hours, 34 minutes, and 2.5618 seconds after my birth that I died, or 76 years, 11 months, 13 days, 15 hours, 34 minutes and 2.5619 seconds after? Nobody knows.
So, what does any of that have to do with my answer to this question? As many of us know from solving problems in different contexts, if we find a problem that's impossible to solve, it means we're approaching it wrong; the same is happening here. Nobody can reach consensus about what happens in the afterlife because THE AFTERLIFE IS A MYTH. IT IS A HUMAN-MADE PERCEPTION THAT DOES NOT EXIST. You have always been, are right now, and will always be, alive, even, if on a scale of 0-100, your aliveness reading has 4000 zero's followed by a one. So, dying is going to be like a more intense version of sleeping, or being in a coma, or experiencing a near-death experiencing but being brought by the marvel of modern medicine- namely, experiencing nothingness, or more accurately, not experiencing at all. That's what happens when you "die".
But then again, everybody's just an asshole with an opinion, myself included. I'd love to hear yours.
