Want to send a message to a dead loved one? Or, heck, any dead person, even one you used to hate? Well, the good folks at Afterlife Telegrams (www.afterlifetelegrams.com) can hook you up. For five bucks a word—and there’s a five-word minimum—they’ll take your message and get it to a terminally ill person who’s likely to be mingling with afterlifers inside of a year. This messenger will promise to memorize your message and do his dead level best to pass the message along to your party. Of course, you have to pay up front. Afterlife Telegrams takes PayPal.
I know some of you are thinking, “How do we know this will work?” Well, you don’t. Afterlife Telegrams doesn’t offer a guarantee. I think this is a major marketing blunder. If I were running Afterlife Telegrams, I’d go ahead and offer a guarantee. People just love guarantees and willingly pay more for guaranteed things. I’d raise the price to 10 bucks a word and publish testimonials from dead people who actually got their message.
To their great credit, the Afterlife Telegram people don’t play that way. The company acknowledges that the afterlife could be a messy, chaotic place where you can’t find anybody. Or dead people could be reincarnated, gone from the afterlife and living back on Earth as collie dogs. People might change their names when they cross over, and some might not want to be bothered.
I suspect a good many dead people would do their best to hide from anybody bringing tidings from Earth. For instance, imagine a man who had two wives in his lifetime. Let’s say he got to the afterlife, met up with his second wife and they’re now on some tropical fourth-dimension island, just frolicking their days away. Next thing you know, here comes some just-dead, out-of-breath messenger with a note from the first wife, going on and on about how she’s looking forward to spending eternity with him, because she knows she was his one true love, and that they would’ve lived happily ever after if not for that psycho hussy who brainwashed him into leaving her. Right then and there, because of one Afterlife Telegram, heaven goes straight to hell.
This Afterlife Telegram business has put me to thinking: I would like to get a message to my dead daddy, Jabo Jowers. Lucky for me, I don’t have to pay for it. Of all the people who read this column, surely a few will be heading for the afterlife before I will and would be willing to tote a message for me, free of charge.
If I’m going to reach out to Jabo across the void, I’m going to need at least two of y’all to work with me—one who knows for a fact that he’s right with God, and one who’s surely hell-bound. As much as I hate to say it, I’ve got some doubt about where Jabo is residing right now. After all, the man did steal my lifetime savings of nickels, then gambled ’em away in a pinball machine.
Anyhow, if some of you readers are willing to help me out, please memorize, and deliver, the following message to Jabo Jowers, or Walter Lee Jowers Sr., or whatever he’s calling himself these days:
Where did you put the sacks of cash? I looked and looked, but they weren’t in the usual hiding places. Did you move them? If so, where? Also, I want you to know that before you were good and cold, your sorry stepwife, Montine, gave your cherry 1950 Studebaker to her brother, then she and her snake-faced daughters stole every stick of furniture out of the house. Could be they stole the cash too. Either way, when Montine arrives in the afterlife, she owes you one cool old car and a truckload of cheap furniture. Of course, if you made it to heaven, you won’t be seeing Montine.
The family and I are doing fine. Please advise about the sacks of cash. Send a collie dog to lead me to them.
Your boychild,
Jabo Junior
It does occur to me, given the way earthly time goes by, that a boy might just forgo the $5-a-word messenger and deliver his afterlife messages face-to-face. We’ll all have our chances soon enough. The Afterlife Telegram folks, who really are soft-sell, say that sending a message might be unnecessary, because dead people might be omnipotent and know everything already.
I think they meant omniscient, not omnipotent. The idea of every dead person being omnipotent is worrisome. Just for a minute, though, let’s assume that dead people are powerful, if not quite all-powerful. Why don’t they send messages to us? It wouldn’t cost ’em a dime. I’ve always thought that if I were an all-powerful being, and I had a message for earthlings, I’d use skywriting, like the witch in The Wizard of Oz.
Just in case any of you dead people are reading this paper, there is one thing I’d like to say: If you want to talk to the living, find a way that doesn’t involve sending garbled messages through prissy men with TV shows. Just connect directly with your party and say what’s on your mind.
Visit Walter Jowers’ Web site at www.housesenseinc.com, or e-mail him at wjowers@nashvillescene.com.
