I found House this spring and summer via my TiVo, Fox, and endless re-runs. House is an irritating, irritable, though brilliant diagnostician—a fictional TV doctor so nasty and sarcastic we’d all like to have him working on our case.

I found Dead Like Me the same way. TiVo and a couple of dozen re-runs.

It’s been a challenge trying to figure out why I missed the first run of both TV series, but I did. Thanks to TiVo and re-runs I can catch up on cool characters just before my own character passes on into oblivion. Or, becomes a tick or tapeworm or perhaps a beagle.

In Dead Like Me, the main character, Georgia Lass, is a pouty, self-absorbed 18-year-old who’s life is ended by a toilet seat which fell from the Soviet-era Mir space station.

George, as co-star Mandy Patinkin calls her, is narrator and protagonist, and becomes a ”grim reaper” when she dies. Grim reapers are the un-dead, they don’t go to heaven, they don’t wait in some kind of purgatory, and they don’t even go to hell.

Grim reapers stay on earth and take the souls of others who die or are scheduled to die and help them on their journey to the afterlife, whatever that may be.

Interestingly, Dead Like Me was more about how the living deal with each other than how the dead deal with death.

Dealing with death after the fact can’t be all that hard, can it?. It’s a done deal already. Dealing with death before the fact is something else again.

All this TiVo-ready hospital, sickness, dying, dead people roles got me to thinking. What happens to us when we die?

It’s either nothing, or something else.

Since there’s little evidence to the contrary, I’m going with nothing, though there’s plenty of argumenation for something else.

There’s just little agreement, lots of argumentation, and not much fact, and less evidence—other than we don’t hear much from the dead.

So, what happens to us when we die?

Most of the evidence points to the James Tiberius Kirk response, ”We cease to exist.” That means we don’t exist as who we were, and probably don’t exist as anything else, either.

As I said, there’s plenty of room for argumentation here, starting with the age old question, ”Why do we die?” It’s probably too late in my personal product life cycle to get started on that one, so I won’t.

Judeo-Christian dogma of a special afterlife, specifically heaven, is also too nebulous for me, faith notwithstanding. Maybe your view is different, but somehow I doubt that a terrorist who blows up an airplane or everyone on a crowded bus will receive 72 virgins in heaven.

Is that even put in writing anywhere? See what faith can do?

Death? Death is the Big Sleep™, the Final Nap, the end result of all those things you did, all those things you wished you’d done but never did, and life’s change event.

Change? Yes, but change to what? Where? Why?

If I could, if I can, I’ll let you know.