I’ve said goodbye to people throughout my life—grandparents, too-young friends, cousins—but right now, maybe starting just before the pandemic, it’s become a pile-up of losses, and it’s the pile-up, I’m convinced, not any single loss by itself, that’ll do you in. In a pile-up, there’s no recovery/healing time between blows.
I’ll spare you the list of people we’ve had to let go of in recent years—trust me, it’s a looooong list that includes both parents. And I know I’m at the age where more frequent deaths are natural and inevitable—just check out obituaries and you’ll see how many people are…well…my age. What I’d rather talk about is how to climb over the pile-up and keep moving on.
Everyone has their own way of navigating death and grief—some ignore it, some bottle it up, some rely on religious faith, some fall apart. I’m not a person who can choke it down effectively (I tend to spontaneously spew my despair eventually; heaven help the innocent bystander). Bottling usually results in some physical manifestation for me—a twitch, a pre-ulcerous condition, inflammation, achy joints, etc., so that’s not a good strategy for me, either. So what I try to do is what I do with most things—analyse: its wrinkles, contours, possible meanings, effects, and outcomes.
My basic belief about what happens after death is that, like everything else, we are energy. And because energy doesn’t die, I think we just drop the skin suit and disperse. That much is science, not woo-woo. Beyond that, I don’t KNOW, and neither does anyone else still alive (some BELIEVE they know, but belief isn’t KNOWING).
That’s actually pretty comforting to me. Since energy cannot be created or destroyed, some essence of us continues. But I don’t think the part of me that will continue has anything to do with the “me” I’ve crafted over the seven decades of my earthly life—the stories I tell myself that make up what I perceive as my individuality/personhood. I don’t think I’ll be playing canasta with my mom and grandma in some heavenly parlour, or have wings, or burn in an imaginary hell. Instead, I’ll revert back to unformed pure potential. Potential for what purpose? I don’t KNOW that either.
I do have a personal BELIEF (woo-woo) in reincarnation, because it’s energy changing forms, which energy is wont to do, and would explain a lot of things for me—déjà vu, memories that don’t seem to be mine, instant feelings about someone I’ve just met, a finite amount of energy (remember it cannot be created) and a constant or growing population—recycled energy.
Science and my beliefs help me process grief, which we don’t really “get over” but learn to live with—I’ve experienced waves of grief out of the blue months or even years after a loss. An “energy is all” death/dispersal explanation doesn’t satisfactorily explain for me why people have to suffer, why there are so many devastating ways to die, why we can’t just “blink out” when our bodies are injured beyond repair or are no longer serviceable. I guess maybe it’s still better than my energy suddenly changing forms by being eaten by a leopard or an alligator, as happens with many other animals.
This week we’re saying goodbye to a dear friend of many years, and to a gifted mentor and poet. In both cases, they leave their kind-hearted, intelligent offspring and their musical, artistic, and lyrical talents behind for those of us still here—like bodhisattvas in the Buddhist tradition. And now that we know a mother’s cells continue in her offspring (https://www.sciencealert.com/millions-of-your-mothers-cells-persist-inside-you-and-now-we-know-how) and that cells might have memories (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-a-cell-remember/) I have even more faith in our continuity, albeit in a different form.
I'm excited for new neuroscience and quantum physics, both of which may be re-thinking consciousness, time, space, and life/death. But for now, when it comes to death and grief, I guess I find solace mostly in energy science, with a smattering of woo-woo, to remind me that life truly does go on.
