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Would You Want To Meet Your Parents In The Afterlife?

I am a middle child which is not a good family position.

My parents had skeletons in their closet and also both suffered living through the 1930s depression.

They were poor, and I learned my father left school in the eight grade to go to work.

My parents never talked about the past that much.

After my father died, I found out he was married in 1920s with a child who died in child birth which broke that marriage.

My mother when younger was always depressed over the death of her sister.

If I run into my parents in the after life, I have lots of questions that maybe could fill in the blanks.
 
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I would not want to meet my parents. I want to leave the past behind. My father was not a pleasant man. Whether my parents would want to meet me, is a moot point too!

I recently saw a film called Prayers for Bobby (Sigourney Weaver). In it, Sigourney Weaver plays the mother of a family of teenage children. She is extremely religious. She wants all her family to meet up again in the afterlife. In order for this to happen, they must lead sin-free lives on earth. One of her sons, however, reveals that he is gay. By his mother's lights, that is a sin. She therefore attempts to cure her son of his sins, learning much herself in the process.

It was an interesting film. But to me, the idea of the whole family meeting up again in an afterlife is horrific.
 
EnolaGaia said:
Although I wouldn't mind encountering and communing with my parents (and / or other ancestors) on the other side, I'd be disappointed to learn the specific relationships none of us asked for when entering our past lives would organize or govern our afterlives as well.
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Well sadly Enola can't answer this, although he would know by now, if there is any afterlife but...

There is an assumption that we didn't ask for these relationships. Actually we can't remember asking for these relationships, not quite the same thing.
 
This is a little off topic, but I would love to meet my parents before they were ever married.

Raising kids and general life worries of every day survival tends to tamp your original personality.

My parents (mom is still here), from what they've mentioned of their younger years, were fun loving and, possibly more adventurous than once they became "adults".

My parents always took us on day trips in the summer. My dad taught us baseball in the yard and always played with us up to about the time we were teens (which would have put him into mid 40's). My dad taught me to waltz and polka. My parents did square dancing for years.

Yes. I would love to see how they developed into these people. And what their hopes and dreams were before life happened.
 
I want statistics on my life when I enter heaven. Time asleep, percentage Time asleep. Amount of time on the Bog, percentage time on the bog. How many haircuts. Number of cups of tea. Miles walked. Hours on here. A full Allen Hansen breakdown.
 
Ronnie Jersey said:
Don't feel bad - I don't. We don't all grow up in wonderful, happy homes, but I've been very lucky in other ways!
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On balance I would like to meet mine so that I can ask them precisely why they did or didn't do certain things which would have been life changing. I would love to meet grandparents though since I only knew mother's mother who died when I was 6, other 3 having passed decades earlier.
 
I suspect that the very first stage is illusionary anyway, and you go to a world that is made up of your beliefs, and that world is as temporary as you want to be, so if you want to be reunited with your parents so be it, but if you believe in Valhalla prepare for the everlasting feast

It kind of makes sense, our identity is purely human, and a soul (or whatever it is) is not, why would physical relationships matter to a soul, especially if you consider this life to be just theater for the soul to gain life experience
 
HamandCheeseSandwich said:
I want statistics on my life when I enter heaven. Time asleep, percentage Time asleep. Amount of time on the Bog, percentage time on the bog. How many haircuts. Number of cups of tea. Miles walked. Hours on here. A full Allen Hansen breakdown.
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Wow - I would like to know how many years in total I have spent, for instance, washing dishes, doing laundry and cooking! :)
 
I would like to meet my parents. Mum is still with us, thankfully, but dad has been gone for 33 years and I still really miss him. Also I would like to meet my grandparents because I only knew one and the rest died young. i also hope my grandad got to see my grandmother again because that was the one he really loved. I hope his second wife is having a happy afterlife but far away from any of my loved ones who she was cruel to.

I like the sound of escargot-nan's spiritualist afterlife. That would comfort me if I believed it, I wish I did. I would imagine that if you are in spirit form you are essentially actually formless so you can spread yourself out a bit and be close to everyone you loved. The whole of the universe, if you were benign enough.
 
Of course there are things I wish I had said (and one or two things I wish I hadn't) to my parents.
This whole thread though is based on the assumption that we, as individuals, will still retain something of us in the afterlife.
I just have a feeling that individual corporeal death, if not resulting in total oblivion, will mean the complete death of ego.
If we do survive in some form, it will be to rejoin a sort of soul-collective, where each of our individual little sparks of humanity will be subsumed into a sort of one-ness encompassing all sapient beings.
 
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Ronnie Jersey said:
Wow - I would like to know how many years in total I have spent, for instance, washing dishes, doing laundry and cooking! :)
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Yes! How many times you’ve trodden on an upturned plug and number of times you’ve stood on Lego.

Perhaps the amount of Lego you’ve hoovered up in lbs and oz. ;)

I’m sure these are all numbers in the big all seeing computer in the sky, that can be accessed.
 
In most likelihood the bonds we have are strictly human, no doubt to comfort some they may appear when you pass over but it's probably not that important
 
I was musing the other day that in 'The Next World' (TM), we could find our bloodlines united: composite souls made up of long and sprawling webs of lineage in a kind of familial communion.

Perhaps you won't merely meet your parents—you could bond with them.
 
Ronnie Jersey said:
Wow - I would like to know how many years in total I have spent, for instance, washing dishes, doing laundry and cooking! :)
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Well considering that most people sleep eight hours a day on average, that's a third of your life, so if you live to be 75 you will have slept for 25 years.

And that's even before all the laundry/washing up/showering/standing in queues/red lights/shaving/shopping and all the other countless mundane stuff we do day in, day out.
 
Not sure the etiquette as my mum died when I was a kid and my dad remarried (a classic evil stepmother). Which wife would he live with in the afterlife? Pretty sure that shit wouldn't fly with my mother (who I always referred to in my head as "his real wife"...)

Another family member told me as dad lay dying, he said to the relative that my mum was the love of his life. Personally, can't believe that although I'd love to. Especially as my stepmother was in the room at the time. No way would he have even whispered it with any chance of her hearing it. I think it's probably my relative's wishful thinking. I was in the room and have no memory of it.

Logistics aside, I'd love to see them again but can't believe it's a thing. Always thought when I think I'm going to die, I will con myself into believing in an afterlife just to make it bearable. But truth is, I don't. I wish I could.

Interesting that many near death people seem to see their dead loved ones appear at the bedside or people who had NDEs report a loved one coming to meet them. Also, I read somewhere that in WW1, the most common thing a soldier who'd been injured and was about to die, said was the word "Mum/Mother". I just wonder if we're hardwired to mentally return to source, but once you're brain dead, assume it's lights out..? But this explains the belief across cultures we'll see our loved ones again?

As for milkman, my grandad was one and his illegitimate children were legion although we only ever knew the first name of one. I did find a randomers' birth cert (short form though) amongst his papers. Which I hid and kept for future reference although I've never gone and looked them up. He would probably have the equivalent of his old Leeds milk round, just getting round them all.
 
escargot said:
We have other threads on the Afterlife. In one I took bookings for ectoplasmically mooning posters' enemies.

I'm considerate like that. :nods:
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Currently in dialogue with the kid of my big brood, that I think will miss me the most when I die. We're trying to decide what form I should send him a message in. (White feathers? Too cliched). So I can reassure him there's an afterlife. (Not that I believe it but it's entertaining trying to figure out what would be a way of signalling "It's me").

ETA: Am seriously thinking of picking something that seems obscure but really isn't so he will eventually see it, and be reassured).
 
I am wondering whether my parents would want to meet me in the afterlife. "Oh God! He isn't looking well, It isn't your time yet Tunn, go back."
 
AgProv said:
hmm... I die and go into the afterlife presuming I can meet and interact with my parents.

Meanwhile they predeceased me and are in the afterlife trying to get facetime with my two sets of grandparents. Who are trying to catch the attention of my great-grandparents who in their turn are working hard on pinning down my great--great grandparents, who in turn are pursuing THEIR parents...

Unless somebody's keeping a very complicated appointments book I can see this creating difficulties!

Then again, the afterlife will be an excellent place to get the genealogy sorted out. i'm looking forward to finding out if (i) I am more than 1/16th Irish (still not enough to get a bloody passport, apparently) and (ii) if there IS any truth in the rumour that my generation are 1/16th Jewish owing to an ancestor who married gentile.
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You nearly had me there, but this is not a simple case of "grains of rice on a chessboard" or "penny for the first nail".

Each individual would only have to keep in touch with their own 2 parents, their own offspring, and occasionally their own grandparents, grandchildren and maybe siblings - more or less the same as they did in life. Yes, there would be twice as many people on each "level", but each individual on each level would not have to interact with everyone on the level above or below.

Be that as it may, in what sense would you be meeting the same person? In life, our personalities are shaped by our needs, desires, challenges, hopes, etc. Especially for older people, the knowledge of, and reaction to, your own mortality and the mortality of the people you love is an important aspect of how you think, feel, and behave.

In an eternal afterlife, which is typically imagined to be blissful and perfect, with no prospect of death or bereavement, no hopes or dreams, we would not be the same people.
 
In all seriousness, yes. My dad died when I was seven, and was in hospital a lot for three years before he died and I only knew one out of four grandparents. I got on well with mum and OK with my grandmother that I knew. I'd like to meet them again and my dad now I'm old enough to get to know him as a person and the other three that I never met.
Dad for instance served in WW1 in the Royal Fusiliers (Mum was his second wife and they had me late in life) He got to France in time for operation Michael, Germany's last push to win before the Americans arrived in real numbers, and he was wounded. There's a story, among I'm sure many more, there that I'm trying to put together from sparse records and I'd love to hear it in full.
 
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