R.I.P.

Dan and Lorna at an unnamed cemetery in Connecticut, 1966.
No offense intended; no offense taken.
That abbreviation for rest in peace…or to put it old (and dead) school requiescat in pace…has been showing up on Facebook with as much frequency as LOL and STFU lately. There seems to have been a spate of recent deaths that have gained an unusual amount of public attention for various reasons—James Garner, beloved actor; Michael Brown, victim of police shooting; Robin Williams, suicidal comic genius; James Foley and Steven Sotloff, grisly casualties of 12th century barbarism and 21stcentury geopolitics; Joan Rivers, both female pioneer and prisoner of that most insidious female curse--vanity.
I’ve noticed on Facebook at least that R.I.P. has been used as the common send-off on these passings over the full spectrum of my relatives, friends, and acquaintances from the most religious to the irreligious. And that’s remarkable given how increasingly divided we are about most every other thing in our culture. Unlike “God Bless” or “Happy Holiday”, R.I.P. doesn’t appear to provoke the outrage we’ve come to expect from ordinary human communication.
This is good, and as it should be. After all, wishing the departed to rest in peace seems like the least judgmental thing we can do. This should be true regardless of race, creed or land of one's birth, and whether someone has had the good fortune of a Garner or Rivers to live long and successful lives or the misfortune of Brown or Foley or Sotloff to have their lives cut down early by armed brutes operating out of fear and hatred .
We all have our demons. Indeed, the patron saint here at the Nob, Norman O. Brown, suggested that every homicide was an act of suicide by mistaken identity. So even the executioner who hides behind a mask as he butchers bound men in the desert and the executioner who hides behind a badge as he kills an unarmed boy in small town America have their troubles. When they die, no doubt, they too will have loved ones who will wish them R.I.P. I, for one, will not begrudge them that because I would really like to believe that there is a place in the great beyond that isn’t as murderous as this one.
That place, however, would not be heaven. I find it a silly fabrication and don’t believe in it as even a remote possibility. After Joan Rivers’ death, a number of well-meaning folks posted on Facebook an old picture of her and Robin Williams together with the comment that heaven just got funnier. God (and I use the term loosely), I hope not. Because if Joan and Robin are really up there making the angels laugh, then that would mean Joan’s still relapsing into plastic surgery and Robin’s still relapsing into drug use…those demons that shaped their talent would still be there with them. (And allowing for the equally silly construct of hell, I’ll stipulate that "Jihadi John" won’t be there, but the same is not so certain of Officer Wilson. After all, a jury of his peers may find him “Not Guilty” of any earthly crime, and an all-loving, merciful God is sure to wave him through that great gated community in the sky. So if Joan Rivers and Robin Williams are there to make us laugh, would not Officer Wilson be there to serve and protect us from unarmed black teenagers as he did on the streets of Ferguson, MO?)  If we really wish the departed to rest in peace, that means relieving them of all the stresses they experienced in this life, no?
That makes Nobby’s description of the “afterlife” more in keeping with R.I.P. and certainly more appealing, for me at least, as what eternity might look like. In Love’s Body Brown writes (quoting the Buddha):

On the other side of the veil is nothing; utopia; the kingdom not of this world. The utopia of nihilism, the negation of the negation; the world annihilated. “Verily, there is a realm, where there is neither the solid nor the fluid, neither heat nor motion, neither this world nor any other world, neither sun nor moon…There is, O monks, an Unborn, Unoriginated, Uncreated, Unformed. If there were not this Unborn, this Unoriginated, this Uncreated, this Unformed, escape from the world of the born, the originated, the created, the formed would not be possible.”