Approaching Doom

My life theme should be "Approaching Doom."  

A good friend once laughed out loud and exclaimed that I was so dismal.  And this was even before I was named Deth.

But I was there, live, listening to a monk of the Dalai Lama, when he said, "the glass is neither empty nor full.  The glass is broken.  And we need to be grateful that we are able to drink from this glass now in its current, unbroken state."  It affected me.  I'm not buddhist, I'm not anything.  But I identified with that.  

I lost my sister 10 years ago, and I see her now like that shattered glass: once something that was whole and capable of the task that we imagined for it, for a human.  But now she is broken pieces of a human, waiting to be re-assembled into something else.  Because everything becomes a part of something else, whether it be a mountain that crumbles to the ocean, becoming rocks on the ocean floor, washing up on shore to become part of a sandy beach, dragged out on the bottom of our feet to streets, floors, garbage cans, and pounded into dust, becoming part of the air that is breathed, lodging in bodies and melting into the surroundings.  Is that dust still a mountain?  

There are mountains inside of us.  And more.  Where does all that has been breathed in go after we die?  If we are burned, cremated, then we are again released into the air: to be breathed in again, to settle at the ocean floor as silt, to be incorporated into the earth.  If we are buried, then what is the meaning of keeping our broken-down pieces in a box?

I wonder about the origins of burial - there are religious histories behind how and why.  I wish to know more.
Wish granted.

Who doesn't love the freaking internets?

My sister:  She is dead now.  What does it mean?  She was cremated, but the dust put into a box and buried.  It wasn't released into the air to eventually become one with one thing or another.  But she had affected and changed so many even before she was gone, including me.

Some glasses get re-assembled: melted down and refashioned into another glass from the same pieces.  Wouldn't that be cool if we could do something like that with the particles of a human still contained in a burial box?  

Of course I'm talking about the resurrection here, maybe the origins of the thought.  Science could make it possible, one day.  But the chance of zombies would be quite high.

To avoid being re-fashioned into a zombie, I think I'd vote for cremation.  It's really quite lovely, when you consider it.  Well, kind of ew too, but that's just I think the whole visceral aversion to death and burning bodies.  Ew.  But they do this every day on the Ganges: a person's pieces are broken down to the tiniest particles, becoming part of the world around me, around you.  Maybe that's her, suspended in the air.  Maybe that's him: the sand that I walk on.  Maybe people are part of the concrete on the roads that I drive on, or maybe I've breathed a few thousand in.  It's a thought to make a horror movie out of someday.

And then there's the unknown conclusions: Maybe we are re-assembled into something that none of us are yet consciously aware of.  We can't forget about ghosts.  Peter Novak makes the most complete manifesto on the topic, I think.  I'd say this book was another thing that drastically changed the way I thought about life.  It is very scientific.  And science is so great.

It's good to be able to talk about all of this.

I tend to think of my sister, most of her particles contained in a box buried deep in the ground, as an entity that is waiting.  I feel her waiting for all of us who miss her to gather together, so we can all move on at the same time.  Waiting and watching.  I feel her watching, too.  I sense her in me, I feel her watching from behind my eyes.  I consider that maybe, in those last months of sitting beside her on her bed, that maybe I ingested a lot of her poisons, and a lot of her pieces as her skin and hair flaked off, as she threw up her insides

It's a bit like an idea of heaven, no?

Because we watch over those we love, in life, and so why not in death?  Especially since all our particles are trapped in a box way underground.

But then there's the whole issue of waiting for everyone to join us.  If this would be true, then once everyone you know joins you, you can't move on because they're going to be waiting on those they love, and when THEY finally die, they will be waiting on those THEY love... it just goes on and on.  And this is another reason that I think the whole resurrection en masse predicted by Christians is such a prevalent thing.  It just makes sense that at some point everyone waiting on everyone would just *poof* turn into that next thing all at once because the virtual world will have reached max capacity.  Cause that's a lot of souls.

And so it goes.