Distances

It will be about 8:30am in your world, which would seem so distant, and slightly unreal, were it not for the fact that your voice and face and smile have danced before us and on our laps through the ether. Your mother has been very brave, but the weight of your pop-pop’s passing is finally settling down upon her like a heavy, unforgiving snow. I know this quiet storm, have felt its chill in my own life, and not so long ago; its duration, but not its forecast, is predictable. Knowing about the storm’s arrival does not diminish its impact once it has arrived. I do so want to be a comfort for her, and for you, but I fear I fall short of my imagination in this regard.

Your grandfather, like all of us, was unique; and, like all of us, exactly the same, as we all must face the certainty of our own mortal deaths. Since (most) of our knowledge of the world passes to us through the multiple filters of our senses, we usually struggle with what at times seems to be an inconceivable fact: we shall cease to be, in every way to which we have become accustomed. The familiar shall terminate, and the unknown shall be embraced.

We grow slowly, don’t we, in our multiple understandings of the world about us, in our ability to cope and function within its boundaries? Our own inner environment, our psyche, struggles to rationalize, to explain, and to cope. This process seemingly begins with our birth and ends with our death. Most of us prefer to behave as though this shall never really happen, like a grand meal that we shall never taste, or a distant country that we shall never visit. It seems so strange and so foreign, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

The longer that we live, the more people we witness forced to have their last meal, their last journey. It seems so unfair, because our minds play the rather cruel game of denial for us, as well as for them. ‘How can it be? How can he be gone? I knew that he would go on forever, as will I.’ Of course we know differently, as we watch the seasons’ cycles of birth, maturation, decay, and death throughout our tenure within its matrix. Yes, we recognize our place there as separate and distinct; but of course, we are really no such thing. We are leaves upon the tree, within the forest, in the continent, upon the globe, spinning at unimaginable speeds toward…what?

Perhaps the largest questions that we shall ever ask shall never be answered. But I can tell you without reservation that they are worth asking; for merely posing the queries helps us in our unceasing desire as human beings to make cogent the inexplicable; to find our place in the here and now, and in the later, too. Your understandings and reconciliations will evolve, and some conclusions you reach shall satiate, and others will leave you thirsty. I encourage you to persist, though, despite the temporary nature of your insights, to pay attention, to listen always to the insistent proddings and yearnings of your heart, allowing your brain’s left side to find the logic, and its right to feel the intuitive truth or falsity of its claims.

Albert Einstein taught us that in our particular universe, and for our relative existence within it, the speed of light is absolute, as the nearer we come to attaining it, the larger our mass becomes; the extensible logic being that we can never attain infinite mass. Well, this would seem to be incontrovertible, at least within the physical realm. But where was our understanding prior to Einstein’s famous thought experiment? Does the knowledge or ignorance of a natural law require our understanding to function? Gravity tugs equally at the ignorant and the enlightened. Faster than the speed of light is the unimaginable speed of thought. Even light cannot approach how quickly I am with you, the distance between us a triviality, a ruler in the hand of a giant.

Stage your own thought experiments, the character of which may be as mundane or as grandiose as you prefer. Your reality, and the conclusions or confusions which result will end up making you what you are, and what you will become. I look forward to sharing some of them, and laughing at others, as you shall surely do with mine. But we shall love each other despite, and because of our differences, the spinning, dizzying truth of our shared, yet separate existences.

Your mother sleeps, and I am with her, though she may not be aware. Her dream consciousness has not altered my perception of her, but now, she sees me differently. If all our relative states of consciousness are constantly in flux, why do we know that “we” are always the same? Could there be another unalterable, absolute state which supports the changing, relative ones?

I have watched you all morning, through your groggy emergence from sleep, to your primping, to your light breakfast, and now. I see your dark hair, your bright eyes, your giggly, genuine laugh. Be happy. Be strong. We love you.