'Sum: Forty Tales From the Afterlives' full of chilling, yet oddly liberating thoughts

In the afterlife perhaps you sit in a large lobby, eating cookies. You are surrounded by a lot of people, some of them famous, and the whole place is lit by fluorescent lights, which makes it impossible to sleep. You are waiting for your name to be called.

As David Eagleman tells it, you are here in this waiting area because there are three deaths: "The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, some time in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time."

It's a chilling and yet oddly liberating thought, one of many to be found in Eagleman's new book "Sum: Forty Tales From the Afterlives." Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, but this slim, volume is fiction: a collection of 40 versions of what he imagines could await us.

You will find the occasional harp and cloud here. But these images of the Great Beyond are more complex, sometimes whimsical, always veering off in an unexpected direction. In total they present a realm where you are certain to learn something about the life you just left behind.

"All the stories are mutually exclusive, so in each there is an opportunity to entertain a different idea," Eagleman explained in a recent phone interview with the Deseret News. Still, he hopes there is this metamessage: "We don't know anything."

So, while Richard Dawkins and the Discovery Institute insist that an intelligent designer doesn't or does exist, Eagleman says that his career in science has taught him "to appreciate the vastness of our ignorance."

The reaction to the book so far has been nearly all positive, he says, including flattering reviews on several religious Web sites. There have also been e-mails from atheists explaining to him that there is no afterlife, and from religious people of various stripes telling him they know exactly what happens after death. There have also been e-mails from readers who have postulated their own versions of the hereafter.

Eagleman, who is 37, grew up in Albuquerque. Raised Jewish, he remembers as a child asking his rabbi what the Jewish view of the afterlife was and being told "if you ask two Jews you'll get three opinions."

In the afterlife perhaps you discover that you are enormous, and that your job is to maintain the cosmos, which is on the brink of disaster, writes Eagleman. It's hard work, but after three centuries or so you get to take a vacation. And it turns out that every one of us chooses the same tourist spot: Earth, where we once again inhabit small, delicate bodies.

"The idea, on such vacations," Eagleman writes, "is to capture small experiences." So we watch movies that make us laugh, we form relationships, we listen to music. What we care about is, simply, "a meeting of the eyes, a glimpse of bare flesh, the caressing tones of a loved voice, joy, love, light, the orientation of a houseplant, the shade of a paint stroke, the arrangement of hair."

Life, in this collection of musings about death, is definitely worth living.

E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com