The Death of Death

This morning I drank my coffee in my usual ritual while I stared at the changing landscape out my window. 

It is autumn here, and we're past the equinox, so the days are shorter and the nights are chilly. The leaves drift endlessly to the ground and create a red-orange-yellow-brown tapestry that carpets the grass beneath, signaling that soon the season of sleep will arrive, and everything will rest for regrowth next year. The seasons are cyclical.  The greens shoots will soon enough peak through the white carpet of frost that will cover my property, and yet again flowers will bloom and the garden will be full with harvest.  

It's not a far leap to imagine that the larger scale of time to which we fancy ourselves subject might follow this same scale.  It is highly plausible that much like the microscale of time repeats over and over again year after year in the churning of seasons, so too then does the unfathomable table of universal time, looping over and over again in an unending cycle that is born and dies and is born again in ways that we cannot even begin to understand.  

It is for this reason that I believe in the importance of memory. Memories are seeds buried in vault of time.   My father, gone these 13 years beyond the veil, exists now in only the flashes of memory that float through the ether of my mind.  His face - whose prominence is receding from my view now - is a holographic projection of my memory, one that I recreate over and over again by the reliving of experiences with him inside my mind.   

Memories are seeds buried in the vault of time.  

This seems dismal, and if we do not properly understand death and dying, it sparks in us great grief.  What is grief, after all, except the testament of love for those who transcend before we do?    My father lives on yet - right there in the timeline where he left me - and I can visit with him any time I need to, can I not?   Grief tells us that because we cannot see or hear them, they are not here.  But this is merely our interpretation of a system that we do not yet understand, one that we perceive governs an event that - to us - is final and exact. 

But death is dying.  Soon enough, we will reimagine what it means to die, and we will begin to understand the nature of life, which is rooted in the continuation of consciousness. We will shed our physicalist interpretation of life and biology soon enough, and when we do, we will experience the death of death, and the reinvention of life itself.