it's late and i just finished a madeleine l'engle book so excuse this

Consider the dead cockroach on my bathroom floor. He has lain there for about a week now, his life snuffed by roach poison when no one was looking. His forlorn little body is directly in my line of vision when I'm using the toilet, which hitherto has been merely unsettling.

But tonight I wondered, where did the roach go?

I believe that people go to heaven or hell when their bodies die. But what of the roach?

If animal life is nothing but biological functions, the acts of blood flowing and nervous system causing movement -- if the roach's life is nothing more than his body -- why does he not cease to exist when his life does? What more is there to a roach, so that his body is left abandoned (by what?) on a bathroom tile? What was there that isn't anymore?

The dead cockroach in my bathroom looks just as unnatural as a person whose spirit has departed. The presence of his emptied shell suggests that there really is something, anything, more in store for whatever consciousness used to live there.

The thought of roaches skittering about in the afterlife is horrifying, but death was never meant to be okay for anything.