The great thing about an afterlife is that we’ve always been able to imagine it as the best possible place for us and our needs. The Black Parade is brilliant, though, because it complicates that. It finds small slivers of hope in the darkness of death and afterlife, yes, but the darkness is still darkness. It still sits, firmly, in the center of the experience of a slow and tedious demise. It does the work that all of our terrific afterlife fantasies don’t: it reckons with the idea that a departure is most difficult because of who we leave behind.
