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Description of The Afterlife and Times of Herbert S. Cooper:

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The Afterlife and Times of Herbert S. Cooper  currently has an Amazon reader review rating of 5 stars from 2 reviews. Read the reviews here.

An excerpt from The Afterlife and Times of Herbert S. Cooper:

There are a few things nobody ever tells you about being dead. The first thing being that dying really bloody hurts. Before you even think to object, I’d ask you to just hear me out. I already know that you’re planning on blowing a bit of sunshine up my arse. All you fleshies do. You people go on and on about seeing a great, bright light or you say how dying feels just like going home. It’s all well and good if you want to believe that nonsense, but first may I suggest that you try death by asphyxiation and then give me your thoughts on the matter. Considering the manner in which most people die, I’m stunned by the amount of dunces out there who think it’s a walk in the park.
My mate James happens to think it’s bullocks too. He was shot twenty-two times by a pair of Thompson automatics in a dirty Chicago alley on a cold day in January. When he was lying there, bleeding out on the cracked cement, his life did not flash before his eyes. Instead, he told me that his last thought was that it might’ve been a good idea to keep the gun in his coat pocket as opposed to underneath the seat. The thought preceding his last was a very appropriately placed “Oh, shit.”
So please, take it from someone with firsthand experience: dying will hurt. I have been dead for many years now, and I’ll be damned (excuse the pun) if I’m going to let any other bloody nonsense on the matter go on for one minute longer. When I died, it was a proper death. An Englishman’s death. No begging, no bartering, no bullshit. In the time leading up to my timely demise, it had been a very bad week anyway, so to be honest with you it wasn’t too much of a surprise. The day that I died, it had been a long day indeed. I had been thinking the entire day of all that I didn’t have going for me.
My loveless marriage to a witch of a woman. My boring job. The insurmountable mountain of debt I had accumulated as result of keeping my wife, Mary, in the manner to which she was accustomed. But that became a secondary problem the day that I walked in on her and her lover in my own house, in my bedroom nonetheless, the latter of them brandishing a very menacing revolver. Mind you, I didn’t go down without a fight of course. I knew he was a little mincing ponce that didn’t have the stones to pull the trigger anyway. After a hasty dustup with him though, I wound up on the short end of the fight with his hands wrapped quite snuggly around my neck. Seems he didn’t appreciate it when I’d wrestled the gun from him and broke his nose in the process.
To this day I still don’t understand why my wife, soon to be widowed at the time, was screaming so damn loud. It was quite rude of her to be yelling about the two of us carrying on so violently. Considering I was the one being choked to death while she screamed her head off, I think it was uncalled for and rude. To be honest, I think I deserved a bit of cathartic release myself. I would have liked to yell myself, but as I mentioned earlier, her lover’s hands wrapped around my neck crushing my larynx made that a tad bit difficult.
Either way, at some point during the screaming and the choking and the all around chaos of our little skirmish, I realized one thing. I was going to die. Kick the can. Fare thee well. Buy the farm and the whole forty acres or whatever it is you yanks like to say. I didn’t really mind the prospect of dying to be honest with you; I was becoming rather nagged by Mary’s incessant screaming, and her beau’s hands around my neck were becoming increasingly uncomfortable.
The odd thing is, up until the point that I knew I was going to die, I hadn’t given much thought to my death. Of course, I hadn’t given much thought to my life either, but who’s keeping score? I wasn’t raised in a necessarily religious family. Unless you would consider working a religion. My father taught me how a man ought to work, and how a man ought to act. I was raised a blue collar gentlemen, and I had no proclivity whatsoever towards spending my Sundays in a pew. I’d rather spend them in a pub resting up for the workweek. Suffice it to say, I had no expectation of heaven or hell or anyplace at all really. I fully planned on spending the rest of eternity not existing. I should be as lucky.
My luck (or rather bad luck) happened to land me someplace I hadn’t expected at all. Instead of disappearing into nothingness and spitting in the face of Descartes’ absurd philosophy, I found myself in a somewhat peculiar setting. At the end of the deep, dark abyss that I sank into as my pulmonary system shut down and my brain died from lack of oxygen, I found myself in…a waiting room. That’s right, a bloody waiting room.
I knew right away that it couldn’t be heaven because the interior decoration was horrid. The floor was a terrible drab of yellow linoleum against bright blue walls. At the front of the room there was a counter with an attendant present like I had landed in some sort of bureaucratic nightmare. The worst part was still to come though. I was stuck at the end of the line leading up to the counter. My very first words upon arriving to the Afterlife were an extremely annoyed “Oh, shit.”
I had just been murdered by my wife’s lover, expecting to disappear into nothingness, and of all the places to wind up, I get stuck here. Mind you, it wasn’t so much my discovery of the existence of a human soul that I found perturbing. What invoked this response was the fact that I absolutely loathe lines. I had been queuing up my entire life, and the avoidance of this was one of the perks of my death that I was very much looking forward to.
But somehow I was still alive, in some form or manner, and I was in the very unfortunate position of being stuck right behind a grotesquely large woman in a bathrobe that didn’t quite cover everything. She looked to be in her fifties and was rambling on to me about having a tight chest just a moment before she came to where she was. She just couldn’t understand why she was in a “hospital waiting room.” I choose to ignore her because I was also still in something of a shock at my circumstances.
I was the same as I had been a moment before. Before I was dead. I saw my reflection in the window that looked out onto a treed courtyard, and saw that there was still very little hair on my head, a dark brown peppered with distinguished gray. I still had a bit of a crooked nose and light brown eyes windowed behind my spectacles. The only difference, actually, was that I was in much different attire than what I’d died in. This was good for me, because I’m pretty sure I had spilled some mustard on my shirt before coming home to be murdered, and that wouldn’t have done at all. Can’t very well show up to the Afterlife in a stained shirt. First impressions are everything, even when you’re dead.
Thankfully, somehow I was in my best suit, the two piece twill that bore the signs of a man who had worked very hard every day in his life. It was explained to me later that when you die, you appear as you wish. Whatever is the best possible version of you that could have been, that is who you become when you cross over. I was just glad to be in my Monday best, but for others the experience was a bit more dramatic.
People who’d been blind their entire lives. People who had been deaf. The sick, the disabled, those who had lost their limbs to war or ravage. They were full. Returned to a glory either formerly known and lost or never known at all. They were given the body of what they could have been, what they should have been. As for myself, if I had been blind my entire life, I don’t know if the first sight that I should ever like to see would be this room, but I imagine it was still something to be cherished, to be a joyous occasion for all of those who were relegated in life. It was small miracles like those that took place in this room frequently. The only regrettable thing about the human state in death, though, was that the stupid were still stupid. No manner of miracle could ever fix that.
I was grateful, however, that the people running this bonanza weren’t stupid at all. It seems they had it down to a science. Newcomers would warily approach the counter, and most if not all would be subsequently redirected to a door on the left marked “Grief Counseling.” Most people hadn’t quite come to the realization that they were dead, and in their incredible foresight, this office had therapists on standby to help them deal with that shock. The banner that hung above the counter that read “Welcome to the Afterlife” was a pretty good clue to me that I was dead, along with the whole being murdered just minutes before part, but like I said, there’s no fix for stupid. At least that’s what I took them to be. Either that or they just hadn’t or couldn’t accept it. The line moved quickly as person after person filed through other doors to meet with the grief specialists, which was fine by me because it meant less time queuin g up.
“Name?” the woman at the counter said briskly as I approached. Straight to the point. No diddly-daddling about with the pleasantries. Very professional.
“Herbert Sycamore Cooper,” I replied. My middle name. Another thing I loathed. My father was an avid arbor enthusiast, and thought it appropriate to give me a name that would get me tossed about by the other boys in grammar school. She began jotting my name down on the some very official-looking paperwork and the process took no more than ten minutes. It was just the usual information: name, place of death, occupations as a fleshie, special skills, religious affiliation (atheist), last of kin (if desired). My family and I didn’t exactly have the best relationship, and by that I mean none at all.
In the Afterlife, the obituaries were always on the front page, above the fold. Whereas on your side they were usually bad news, over here they were like bloody wedding announcements. And heaven forbid your dead relatives somehow found out you were on your way out. They’d be waiting in the Welcoming Station (the nickname for this place) for you when you died, with balloons and streamers and all other sorts of nonsense that shouldn’t be shoved onto a newdead as soon as they get here. In case you hadn’t picked up on that, newdead is the slang around here for those who’ve just expired. We call the living “fleshies,” although you can’t say that in mixed company because it’s not politically correct. Rubbish.
After she had written down all my information, she promptly handed me a brochure and told me to have a seat and wait for my case manager to arrive. I took a look down at the brochure as I took my seat. It read as follows:

SO NOW YOU’RE DEAD
Greetings, newdead! Welcome to the Afterlife. There are a few things nobody ever tells you about being dead. The first thing being that dying really bloody hurts. Before you even think to object, I’d ask you to just hear me out. I already know that you’re planning on blowing a bit of sunshine up my arse. All you fleshies do. You people go on and on about seeing a great, bright light or you say how dying feels just like going home. It’s all well and good if you want to believe that nonsense, but first may I suggest that you try death by asphyxiation and then give me your thoughts on the matter. Considering the manner in which most people die, I’m stunned by the amount of dunces out there who think it’s a walk in the park.
My mate James happens to think it’s bullocks too. He was shot twenty-two times by a pair of Thompson automatics in a dirty Chicago alley on a cold day in January. When he was lying there, bleeding out on the cracked cement, his life did not flash before his eyes. Instead, he told me that his last thought was that it might’ve been a good idea to keep the gun in his coat pocket as opposed to underneath the seat. The thought preceding his last was a very appropriately placed “Oh, shit.”
So please, take it from someone with firsthand experience: dying will hurt. I have been dead for many years now, and I’ll be damned (excuse the pun) if I’m going to let any other bloody nonsense on the matter go on for one minute longer. When I died, it was a proper death. An Englishman’s death. No begging, no bartering, no bullshit. In the time leading up to my timely demise, it had been a very bad week anyway, so to be honest with you it wasn’t too much of a surprise. The day that I died, it had been a long day indeed. I had been thinking the entire day of all that I didn’t have going for me.
My loveless marriage to a witch of a woman. My boring job. The insurmountable mountain of debt I had accumulated as result of keeping my wife, Mary, in the manner to which she was accustomed. But that became a secondary problem the day that I walked in on her and her lover in my own house, in my bedroom nonetheless, the latter of them brandishing a very menacing revolver. Mind you, I didn’t go down without a fight of course. I knew he was a little mincing ponce that didn’t have the stones to pull the trigger anyway. After a hasty dustup with him though, I wound up on the short end of the fight with his hands wrapped quite snuggly around my neck. Seems he didn’t appreciate it when I’d wrestled the gun from him and broke his nose in the process.
To this day I still don’t understand why my wife, soon to be widowed at the time, was screaming so damn loud. It was quite rude of her to be yelling about the two of us carrying on so violently. Considering I was the one being choked to death while she screamed her head off, I think it was uncalled for and rude. To be honest, I think I deserved a bit of cathartic release myself. I would have liked to yell myself, but as I mentioned earlier, her lover’s hands wrapped around my neck crushing my larynx made that a tad bit difficult.
Either way, at some point during the screaming and the choking and the all around chaos of our little skirmish, I realized one thing. I was going to die. Kick the can. Fare thee well. Buy the farm and the whole forty acres or whatever it is you yanks like to say. I didn’t really mind the prospect of dying to be honest with you; I was becoming rather nagged by Mary’s incessant screaming, and her beau’s hands around my neck were becoming increasingly uncomfortable.
The odd thing is, up until the point that I knew I was going to die, I hadn’t given much thought to my death. Of course, I hadn’t given much thought to my life either, but who’s keeping score? I wasn’t raised in a necessarily religious family. Unless you would consider working a religion. My father taught me how a man ought to work, and how a man ought to act. I was raised a blue collar gentlemen, and I had no proclivity whatsoever towards spending my Sundays in a pew. I’d rather spend them in a pub resting up for the workweek. Suffice it to say, I had no expectation of heaven or hell or anyplace at all really. I fully planned on spending the rest of eternity not existing. I should be as lucky.
My luck (or rather bad luck) happened to land me someplace I hadn’t expected at all. Instead of disappearing into nothingness and spitting in the face of Descartes’ absurd philosophy, I found myself in a somewhat peculiar setting. At the end of the deep, dark abyss that I sank into as my pulmonary system shut down and my brain died from lack of oxygen, I found myself in…a waiting room. That’s right, a bloody waiting room.
I knew right away that it couldn’t be heaven because the interior decoration was horrid. The floor was a terrible drab of yellow linoleum against bright blue walls. At the front of the room there was a counter with an attendant present like I had landed in some sort of bureaucratic nightmare. The worst part was still to come though. I was stuck at the end of the line leading up to the counter. My very first words upon arriving to the Afterlife were an extremely annoyed “Oh, shit.”
I had just been murdered by my wife’s lover, expecting to disappear into nothingness, and of all the places to wind up, I get stuck here. Mind you, it wasn’t so much my discovery of the existence of a human soul that I found perturbing. What invoked this response was the fact that I absolutely loathe lines. I had been queuing up my entire life, and the avoidance of this was one of the perks of my death that I was very much looking forward to.
But somehow I was still alive, in some form or manner, and I was in the very unfortunate position of being stuck right behind a grotesquely large woman in a bathrobe that didn’t quite cover everything. She looked to be in her fifties and was rambling on to me about having a tight chest just a moment before she came to where she was. She just couldn’t understand why she was in a “hospital waiting room.” I choose to ignore her because I was also still in something of a shock at my circumstances.
I was the same as I had been a moment before. Before I was dead. I saw my reflection in the window that looked out onto a treed courtyard, and saw that there was still very little hair on my head, a dark brown peppered with distinguished gray. I still had a bit of a crooked nose and light brown eyes windowed behind my spectacles. The only difference, actually, was that I was in much different attire than what I’d died in. This was good for me, because I’m pretty sure I had spilled some mustard on my shirt before coming home to be murdered, and that wouldn’t have done at all. Can’t very well show up to the Afterlife in a stained shirt. First impressions are everything, even when you’re dead.
Thankfully, somehow I was in my best suit, the two piece twill that bore the signs of a man who had worked very hard every day in his life. It was explained to me later that when you die, you appear as you wish. Whatever is the best possible version of you that could have been, that is who you become when you cross over. I was just glad to be in my Monday best, but for others the experience was a bit more dramatic.
People who’d been blind their entire lives. People who had been deaf. The sick, the disabled, those who had lost their limbs to war or ravage. They were full. Returned to a glory either formerly known and lost or never known at all. They were given the body of what they could have been, what they should have been. As for myself, if I had been blind my entire life, I don’t know if the first sight that I should ever like to see would be this room, but I imagine it was still something to be cherished, to be a joyous occasion for all of those who were relegated in life. It was small miracles like those that took place in this room frequently. The only regrettable thing about the human state in death, though, was that the stupid were still stupid. No manner of miracle could ever fix that.
I was grateful, however, that the people running this bonanza weren’t stupid at all. It seems they had it down to a science. Newcomers would warily approach the counter, and most if not all would be subsequently redirected to a door on the left marked “Grief Counseling.” Most people hadn’t quite come to the realization that they were dead, and in their incredible foresight, this office had therapists on standby to help them deal with that shock. The banner that hung above the counter that read “Welcome to the Afterlife” was a pretty good clue to me that I was dead, along with the whole being murdered just minutes before part, but like I said, there’s no fix for stupid. At least that’s what I took them to be. Either that or they just hadn’t or couldn’t accept it. The line moved quickly as person after person filed through other doors to meet with the grief specialists, which was fine by me because it meant less time queuin g up.
“Name?” the woman at the counter said briskly as I approached. Straight to the point. No diddly-daddling about with the pleasantries. Very professional.
“Herbert Sycamore Cooper,” I replied. My middle name. Another thing I loathed. My father was an avid arbor enthusiast, and thought it appropriate to give me a name that would get me tossed about by the other boys in grammar school. She began jotting my name down on the some very official-looking paperwork and the process took no more than ten minutes. It was just the usual information: name, place of death, occupations as a fleshie, special skills, religious affiliation (atheist), last of kin (if desired). My family and I didn’t exactly have the best relationship, and by that I mean none at all.
In the Afterlife, the obituaries were always on the front page, above the fold. Whereas on your side they were usually bad news, over here they were like bloody wedding announcements. And heaven forbid your dead relatives somehow found out you were on your way out. They’d be waiting in the Welcoming Station (the nickname for this place) for you when you died, with balloons and streamers and all other sorts of nonsense that shouldn’t be shoved onto a newdead as soon as they get here. In case you hadn’t picked up on that, newdead is the slang around here for those who’ve just expired. We call the living “fleshies,” although you can’t say that in mixed company because it’s not politically correct. Rubbish.
After she had written down all my information, she promptly handed me a brochure and told me to have a seat and wait for my case manager to arrive. I took a look down at the brochure as I took my seat. It read as follows:

————————————————————

SO NOW YOU’RE DEAD
Greetings, newdead! Welcome to the Afterlife. We realize that this is a hard and trying time in your Death, and we would like to extend our deepest condolences. However, this brochure is to inform you of procedures and policies in effect for the duration of the Afterlife.
1. Access to the mortal realm is strictly prohibited. Anyone committing unsanctioned movement across the plane will face severe penalties. Anyone caught aiding and abetting a person committing cross-realm travel will be prosecuted as well. Soliciting services for communications across the plane is also illegal.
2. You are classified as a perpetual life-force. While you retain a seemingly physical body with all five senses available, you cannot become hungry, die again, become sick, or injure yourself in any manner. Please do not purchase any sort of medical or death insurance, as this is a scam and the bureaucracy does not insure against idiocy.
3. Please refer to your case manager for any problems including but not limited to: employment, residential accommodations, grief counseling, educational benefits, and any other question or concerns you may have.
As we await the next step in our existence, please take this time to enjoy Death. You only die once.

Always Dead,
Alberta Fennimore
Bureau of Newdead Integration

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