According to what? No. 1 — Death as the 'Big Crunch'

What if, when you die, the Big Bang — in reverse — occurs, with you as the universe?

Cosmologists (now a minority) who still believe in a universe that is born by exploding into being and then reaches an expansion limit, only to fall back inwards in what's termed the "Big Crunch," postulate such an event on an unimaginably large scale.

Here I suggest it as the physical expression of death.

Whatever makes you who you are — and it's certainly not your body and senses — compacts itself back into the quantum foam.

Rebirth?

Probably not, at least not as you were: with infinitely many outcomes from a Big Bang, we'd expect someone at least a little different each time, don't you think?

Perhaps a life, human or otherwise, in the larger picture is simply a 3-D sketch of sorts, moving through a relatively brief fourth dimension of time, an avatar, if you will, standing in for the "real" person.

Of course, the best part will come in the year 15667 — give or take a decade — when they finally open up the tiny nested Russian doll at the center of the myriad larger ones discarded over the millennia, only to find that — surprise! — there's nothing there.

That's why this series is called "According to what?"