My unreinforced apartment was as malnourished as I was and we both collapsed in a single torrential downpour. I was on a deadline, drinking nothing but water with apple cider vinegar, and two hours before my dinner date, I was crushed to death under the concrete.
But apparently there’s a rule in the afterlife these days. A last supper for a person who died suddenly. It was quite generous. At the table I was sitting at, there was just an old man and I.
‘What would you like to have?’ asked the afterlife waiter.
‘I’ll have the aglio e olio from Master Chef Season 17, please?’
‘Well… You can have aglio e olio, but only the version you’ve eaten in your lifetime.’ The waiter replied.
‘I have a fine dining reservation for tonight, is that not on the menu?’
‘It is, the one you have had in your lifetime…🙏🏻’
‘I’ll just have an aglio e olio then. Oh, by the way, can I have it with garlic since we’re ghosts?’
‘They said it’s okay if you have eaten it during your life. Can a Korean live without garlic?’
The old man replied that he had lived alone all his life with no wife and children. He ordered his mother’s homemade tofu and marinated wild onion, whose shanty room at the shanty town had washed away during the storm. When he ordered it, he stressed that he wanted it to be warm.
I wondered why anyone would ask such a thing when we were alive. ‘What do you most want to eat before you die?’
What would be the need for it just before death? But, now, not just when you’re about to die. You still have the chance. You can sleep after you die, but you must eat before you die. Now, right now.