We are always dying. Our cells decay and get replaced. Our memories are buried under the weight of new ones. The way we perceive the world itself changes in the face of new ideas and opinions and experiences. The person I was at five isn’t the person I was at ten isn’t the person I was at twenty and definitely not the person I am at forty five.
So what happened to the five year me? Is he dead? Should we grieve for him? We should, if we define “me” as being the physical representation of the person who answers to my name. And yet we don’t grieve. Because we know the fatter, the less cute, more cynical, and beaten down version of me is still me, still alive, because there is a continuous chain of thoughts, memories that connect the forty-five year old me with the five year old me.
Which is why a person, the way I see it, is a trajectory, a curve defined through time and space. When we ascribe personhood we really do it to the curve, not the bag of flesh and bones.
And yet we often hear “he was a great father but a terrible husband” or “he ignored his family for his job” or “everyone hated him except his readers”.
How can that be, when it’s the same trajectory in space-time we are referring to?
That’s because the curve of the trajectory that is us is a composition, of the curve that is defined by our own experiences and the curve that is defined by yours.
Yes. You. The observer.
The way my wife sees me isn’t the way my parents see me isn’t the way my colleagues see me isn’t the way my readers see me as, isn’t the way my daughter sees me, even though they see the exact same bag of bones.
That’s because they cannot separate their trajectory from mine, and they end up with the composite and think that’s me.
No, it isn’t. It’s me, to an extent, but also you.
We find that friends suddenly block us on Facebook. They will say they don’t like the person we have become, or putting in another way, do not approve of the trajectory that defines us at that point of time.
What they don’t realize sufficiently is that what they perceive of our trajectory is a function of their own. This is kind of like the notion of the observer in Newtonian mechanics. If both of us are moving at the same velocity, we appear static to each other. If both of us are moving away from each other, the velocity we see is the summation of my velocity with yours.
Which brings me to the point.
Dying.
Dying is the point. It’s the cessation of the bag of bones, this is where it all disintegrated into ash or dust, but we have established that receptacle of the body is merely a surrogate for our real identity.
The curve. The trajectory.
That remains though, after death. The curve. Not that part which makes new memories or experiences, but the part that is contributed to by the living.
Because the person may be dead. The observer is not.
We say, those that are remembered do not die. That was the premise of Coco. But this remembrance isn’t just a passive act, it’s not just “father used to tell me stories” or “I had great times at my grandparents”, it’s about “now I know what Ma meant” or “I think I understand my father better now”, it’s about your trajectory imbibing the trajectory of they who are no longer with us. And most of this happens even without us being conscious, we become like our parents, we look like our spouses, and people say that often, without realizing its deeper significance.
That’s the way I want to look at death. The curve has changed, no doubt. Once someone dies, like a rocket it has discharged its booster, the physical body. Death dampens the curve too, for the trajectory won’t change, not by itself.
But it will still not stop. The trajectory will still change.. It will change through us, the once observers now survivors, through our own innate curve, our own chain of memories and experiences building on the imbibed trajectories, inseparable from us, until we too will be absorbed in another curve.
This is not to say death isn’t sad, but it’s never the end.
You only have to look inside to find they who are gone.
Thank you for writing this.
Had thought about this topic often, in similar terms, about memories and living on in memories, but as happens often, the words waited and waited and never did come.
You are gifted, for you put down in clear words, what a lot of us struggle with, and so, thank you again, for the times are such each of us has confronted our mortality and the mortality of those we love and care about.
Stay safe and may you and your loved ones are safe.
God bless.