Huh

I had a strange experience today: I met a child who I feel quite sure is the re-embodiment of my step-brother. My uncle Earl, my cousin Logan and her 18-month-old son have come to town for a visit, and when I saw the child for the first time, he looked me straight in the eyes and I thought, "Oh, hi there, Grey." The boy, whose name is Coen, doesn't look like Grey at all, really, except for a superficial similarity around the ears and hairline, but I swear that there was that moment of recognition between us.

I guess this is as good a place as any to expand on one of the deeply-held beliefs that I listed in a previous post, to wit, “Energy is never lost, it simply changes form.” Yes, this is a paraphrase of the First Law of Thermodynamics, but I have always felt that it has a much larger application, beyond the usual physics classes.

If you can imagine the universe as a closed system (albeit a really big one), in which there is a constant level of matter/energy, then it’s pretty simple to conceive of death as a transformation rather than a loss. The body, of course, is matter and returns to its component parts as it is re-absorbed into the earth, whether buried, cremated, or donated to science.

The spirit, soul, psyche, essence or whatever you want to call it is basically energy, so it also is recycled, since it cannot simply disappear into nothingness, what with being part of a closed system. Therefore, it seems logical that the thing that makes someone a person might find itself clothed in a new body after it is separated from the old one.

For all of written history (and considerably before that, from what we can tell) people all over the world have come up with different ways to explain the idea that death is not the end of a person. Some of the stories we tell ourselves make some sense to me, but they are almost all draped in so much pomp and fear that my straightforward self shies away form them. I distrust any explanation or organization that seems to layer too much complication and mystery on anything, so I have spent the past couple of decades considering the various explanations offered up, and I like mine best. It’s simple, it’s logical, it’s elegant, and it allows for the fact that we are really all just guessing about the nature of life, the universe and everything.