Goines On: How ever not?

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Goines read legacy.com’s annual reminder of a friend’s passing four years earlier, a friend he had thought of several times during the year without needing to be reminded. Goines had highly valued this friend, and he wondered how this friend, or any friend who died, could no longer be there, not be somewhere else rather than nowhere.
    Of Goines himself, he wondered, How could Goines not be somewhere after he died?
    Goines could not imagine not being.
    If he had never existed – were not here now, or anywhere else either – who could then imagine, or have imagined, him existing somewhere?
    Goines sighed at the thought that though he could not imagine not having existed, could not imagine his friend no longer existing, he could conceive it, theorize about it – an activity utterly different from imagining it.
    Ever since reasoning himself away from the theist beliefs taught him in his childhood and early adolescence, he had believed that before he or anyone else came to be they had not existed, and after they died they existed no more. Was Goines now feeling unsure of that?
    But, he reflected, feeling was still a different thing, not the same as either imagining or conceiving. Goines determined to concentrate on just being the complex creature he was, and enjoy it.
    Yet the wonder stayed with him, stayed like a candle blowing in the wind or a comforting blanket: how could a person ever not exist somewhere – somehow – both before living and after dying? Why ever not?

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