super found me that night when he came by to check on a leak in my bathroom that was causing water to flood the apartment beneath mine. The coroner’s office deemed it thrombosis or, more likely, an embolism. The rest is history, or more accurately, nothing more than a mention in the Daily News obituary column because they recognized my name. I was all of forty-four years old.
I had expected to live way into my eighties, like my senile father who was happily enjoying the twilight of his life in an assisted living home in Riverhead, Long Island, or at the very least into my midseventies, like my mother before she lost her bout with cancer.
Dying at the age of forty-four with two published novels, eight published plays, and four shared screenplay credits on IMDb was far from what I had expected concerning my life’s work. My entire writing career was ahead of me, or so I’d thought. I had plans for another play, eventually other novels. All were going to be monumental stories with important cultural themes, which made me daydream about winning first a Pulitzer, later on the Nobel Prize. I’d also thought that with more artistic success under my belt, maybe I’d settle down and get married to Sarah, yet an artistic success was a novel that most critics loved but in general, nobody outside of your friends, ever read.
I’d been teaching film writing part-time, adjunct, at CUNY and NYU and had taken all the necessary steps to become famous in my lifetime. I had a clear career path, as they say. I had no baggage. I’d never married and never had children in order to ensure that life’s detours didn’t distract me. I made money from studio and network writing assignments, I had a successful agent (nearly an impossibility), and I was smart enough to save my money, not spend it all on a big house in Santa Monica after I sold my first screenplay only to never work again and lose it all. I had heard of so many writers—those who lived on the edge, who did rewrite work—who were deemed too old for the studios when they turned fifty and weren’t hired anymore. I swore I wouldn’t become one of them, but of course dying at my age made this irrelevant.
I’d been living in a modest fifth-floor apartment in the trendy Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, gliding nicely along, considering myself at my peak when it came to the true understanding of plot, story, and theme. Hell, I was right there. I had learned the three-act structure format so well it had become part of my DNA.
I was a member of the Writers Guild of America, East; the Authors Guild; the Dramatists Guild of America; Poets & Writers; and PEN International. I was, in the most specific definition possible, an artistic success.
My first novel, The Last Vision, was about an aging and lonely poet’s last day of life as he roams the streets of his small Long Island town, struggling to complete a poem he has spent ten years writing. When the clock strikes midnight he completes the poem and then commits suicide by throwing himself in front of a Long Island Rail Road commuter train on the Port Jefferson line. Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews gave it rave reviews; The New Yorker actually called it “brilliant.”
My second novel, The Dead Mexican, was the story of an illegal immigrant from Oaxaca who is murdered by a racist cop in a small town in upstate New York; his young wife sneaks into the country to find his murderer. The New York Times called it a “masterpiece of social comment and intrigue.”
But that was then and this is now. And now I’m no longer in existence. I don’t need to tell you about the wake or the funeral or that my grave is in Calvary, a big cemetery in Queens. Those are incidentals. What is important is that I learned a lot about immortality after dying, because no one knows much about it before you die.
I was one of those who craved immortality and thought that perhaps a little notoriety on Earth would bring some fame after my demise. There was nothing wrong with that notion, or so I thought. And then, like I keep saying, I ruined it all by actually dying.
CHAPTER 2
Time moves quickly after you die. Your wake, your funeral, the burial ceremony–they all feel like a movie trailer you watch without emotion. Faces, names seem trivial; time is insignificant. I saw Sarah standing at my grave. She was crying and she was holding my father’s hand. He seemed to be enjoying what was going on and probably had no idea why he was standing in the cemetery. Dementia reigned supreme in his existence. My agent, Claudia Wilson, never showed up nor did any of my friends, but because I didn’t have any really close friends, I wasn’t too upset.
After your burial, the next time you are aware of anything, you are someplace you’ve never been before.
A young man in his late twenties told me I was now in the Writers Afterlife. We were sitting together on a wooden bench on a hill. There was a wonderful breeze, the sun felt early morning–like, and my surroundings were really quiet.
“Call me Joe,” he said. He was trim, small-boned, with a slight beard and shoulder-length hair. He wore a silk white shirt trimmed with silver, a gold cross, and several rings. One onyx ring could have been from Persia and the other ebony ring from Greece. He had sandals on his feet and loose black trousers. “So, as you no doubt surmised by now, you’re dead. You’ve passed on to a place all writers go to after they die.”
I listened closely. He had a soothing voice.
“You probably have a lot of questions and that’s fine. Everyone, no matter who they are, has questions. But first you will be given an ovation for living a writer’s life.”
“An ovation? For real?” I asked.
“For real,” he assured, “it’s the Writers Afterlife.”
I suddenly found myself on a large outdoor stage, sitting on a chair facing an audience of thousands. Colorful banners waved in the wind and there was an orchestra playing from someplace I couldn’t see.
Joe appeared at my side. “Take a bow.”
I stood up, walked to center stage, and faced the thousands of strangers who were smiling in an anticipation of something. I wondered who could be in the audience . . . any family? My mother was dead. My agent couldn’t be there and neither could any of my competition on Earth. I wondered if any of the great members of the literary elite were seated facing me.
“They’re expecting a speech,” Joe said.
“I don’t have one prepared,” I told him.
“We know,” he said, then handed me a piece of paper and disappeared behind me.
I looked down at the paper and there was a prewritten speech on it. I read aloud the large, bold print. “My name is Tom Chillo and I’ve spend most of my life as a writer.”
I heard applause.
I continued reading. “Poetry changed my life while I was still a teenager. Then when I grew older all books did. I read every novel I could find.”
The crowd applauded again.
“In college I saw plays and loved reading them, then eventually writing them. I had always written poetry or so it seemed. After graduate school I wrote screenplays. Writers are born, not made. Writing is a vocation, not a vacation. Thank you for listening.” I bowed. It was all true and I felt a sense of accomplishment as the crowd not only applauded but cheered. I saw hundreds and hundreds of happy faces sitting in chairs on the green manicured lawn that rolled out into the distance bigger than a football field and in all directions.
The audience seemed to care about everything I said. Some stood up when I was done and gave me a standing ovation just as I was promised. I was amazed at my own charm and sense of presence at that moment.
There was also a Q&A where the audience asked me about my work. We discussed my plays and how they were influenced by my notion that it was my mission to record the story of life and how it occurred on my planet—the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn. I told the audience how I could hear my characters specifically as they spoke and how their dialogue revealed who they were, their aspirations and their dreams, as well as their disappointments and failures.
I also told them that it was important