All in Flux

Everything dies. Everything is born. One cannot exist without the other, for death implies that at one time that thing was new and fresh, recently born. We can imagine an immortal being who never dies. But is she really immortal? Would she be the same person at one thousand years old that she was at one hundred? As adults we have memories of childhood and we think we were once that being. But most of our cells would be entirely different. Sure, we can say that we must share billions or perhaps trillions of brain cells. Otherwise, we wouldn't have those childhood memories. But even then, could we really say those are the same neurons? We can look at a particular neuron we think must be the same. That neuron has been exchanging matter and energy since its own birth. The best we could say is that that neuron is a copy of the childhood neuron. In fact, it must be that. If it were the same, it would be changeless, frozen in time, permanent. And since its job is to interact with the universe, everything else would have to be permanent. There would be no such thing as time and no such thing as the impermanent activities and emotions we call our lives. In order to exist (at least in the way we can conceive it), things must die. We must die.

On Saturday, July 31 2010 my dad passed away. It was a long, slow decline to the point when he stopped breathing. But it's still hard. We all want to believe that we and our loved ones will somehow cheat death. It's somewhat selfish of us to want our loved ones to hang around and suffer for a year or two or more so we don't feel the grief of death. And it's self-deceiving to believe that after death there's a magical place full of bliss (or one full of pain). Or to believe we will somehow be reborn into another person. Those are silly childish notions. But after our physical bodies die, we will be reborn, in a manner of speaking. My father lives on through my brother and I, and through my mom. He touched us, through his words and actions he changed us. By doing that, there's a little bit of him in us. If I ever have kids, there will be a little bit of my father in them, and in their kids and in their kids' kids... Even if my brother and I never have kids, my father influenced others besides immediate family members. There's something like only six or seven degrees of separation between any two people in the world. So some Chinese rice farmer who's never met my father or was ever remotely aware of him was changed by him. My father lives on in that rice farmer and in every other human being on the planet. His cremated ashes will help fertilize a plant or feed a fish. In the vast, distant future after the sun has swallowed the Earth and has blown itself apart, my father's ashes will help fuel a star. As the astronomer Carl Sagan said, "We are all made of star-stuff." Conversely, star-stuff is made of us. Or, as my father said, "We are made of atoms. The configurations change, but it's still just atoms." Everything's cycle of birth and death is dependent upon everything else, a very large interlocking web of causality throughout the universe. Yes, my dad died last Saturday. But so too a whole universe of possibility was reborn.