Let me give you two examples of people who have died very recently.
Rush Limbaugh is sometimes called divisive, but was a lying, vitriolic hatemonger who took pleasure in insulting and attacking those who held opinions with which he disagreed. He died from lung cancer.
Captain Tom Moore was centenarian WWII veteran who became somewhat famous for walking the length of his garden 100 times to raise money toward fighting the Covid-19 pandemic. Interviews showed him to be a cheerful, genial, cheeky old man whose family utterly adored him. He died from being almost a 101 years old.
Both men are now dead and what has happened to them is identical. The electrochemical processes that gave them life and thought, personality and identity, have ceased and the thing that made them them is no more.
What is left of them is what lingers in the world - the people’s lives they each touched, the memories they left, the way they mad others feel.
I know there will be people who were left bereft at the death of Rush Limbaugh, both those who knew and loved him and those who were fan of his work, but there are many who frankly celebrated. There are thousands upon thousands of lives that were made worse by his words, his incitements to hatred and even violence, his mocking of people with HIV and, ironically, his refusal to accept the proven link between smoking and lung cancer.
I’m sure Captain Tom in his time caused hurt; as a human being he would have been as flawed as any, and we all at times hurt others through our inattention or thoughtlessness or callousness, but at the end he left many people feeling better about the world and about their species and about themselves.
I know which state I’d wish for my “afterlife”, even if I will not be there to appreciate it.
( Originally published on Quora in answer to the question "What do you believe happens after we die being a horrible person?"
https://atheismandscience.quora.com/What-do-you-believe-happens-after-we-die-being-a-horrible-person-32?)
