After her death Christopher has his own way of thinking where his mother is now. Explain what you think of his ideas and compare them to your own beliefs. Do you find them disgusting? Comforting? Weird? Factual? How do his ideas fit with what you know about his way of thinking?


Christopher as a special kind of human has a very factual view of life and death and life after death. Actually, he does not believe in life after death for the reason that he cannot imagine that there is something like heaven or hell or even a soul. He rather thinks of humans as biochemical complexes whose lives are over when their brains stop working. The only way people could exist further is - in Christopher's opinion - as dust and molecules we get in our lungs every time we breathe. This point of view must be sort of disgusting for some people. I also can just partly agree with his perception. Our bodies might be divided into tiny pieces after we are dead and we will become part of the environment but I believe in souls. I have no idea what could happen to them; either there is a heaven or reincarnation or anything else. No one can tell because no one has ever returned from death until now. Moreover, it is unromantic to think that we are just bodies with no content or deeper sense. It is hard to accept that our thoughts and emotions will end with our death so we try to make up a world beyond life. And that might be the reason why most of the people feel uncomfortable when they are confronted with Christopher's way of thinking.

(by Ly)


As we know Christopher can only understand things which he can explain to himself with science (physics, maths, etc.). So when he was told his mother died, he had to imagine where she has gone. Mrs Forbes told him that her mother has gone to heaven but he cannot trust her because she believes in heaven and for Christopher, who is not able to explain heaven in a scientific way, it does not exist though. When her husband, the vicar called Reverend Peters, told him that heaven is not in our universe Christopher tried to explain this possibility with a black hole in fact that there is nothing in our universe like heaven. And to get dead people there he thought of shooting them on rockets into the black holes but this would be noticed by other people.

But his mother was cremated so she burnt into ash and smoke. What happened to the ash he will never know because he could not ask the crematorium due to his absent during the funeral. The smoke went through the chimney into the sky and so Christopher thought that there were molecules of his mother in the sky, “or in clouds over Africa or the Antarctic, or coming down as rain in rainforests in Brazil, or in snow somewhere.”

Christopher tried to explain heaven as a proven thing by science as in fact he cannot imagine illogical things. He does not notice that he destroys the beliefs of other people with his way of thinking and explaining. His biological view on death is in my opinion the most factual and believable explanation (because it is science) but the idea of shooting dead people with rockets into black holes is far from factual it is more disgusting and weird. However, all in all it is a typical thought of Christopher by explaining it with science.


As for me, the biological explanation fits the most because I do not believe such things as heaven but maybe some kind of circulating souls in the world.

(by Philipp)

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