The Death Essays, Part II: Death after Life

[LMNO]

The other night I was sitting on the couch, listening to some records, drinking wine, and the now-familiar melancholy washed over me.  Which, I suppose, isn't surprising, given the environment I put myself in.  I thought about dad, and a passage from a play came into my head:

No, not for us, not like that... Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game that will soon be over. Death is not anything, death is... not.  It's the absence of presence, nothing more... The endless time of never coming back... A gap you can't see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound...

That's from Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead.  I read that back in high school, and loved it so much I built up a conceptual music piece around it; which is probably why I remembered it.  Back then, I was fascinated by the existential humor and light-hearted darkness of it all.  I felt really clever for liking it, because it was clever.  But that when I was young, and we were all going to live forever.

I went to the bookshelf, found my old worn-out copy of the play, leafed through it, reading out some of the more appropriate passages.  The whole thing changes when someone close to you dies.  Where once all I saw was bleak jokes and linguistic pratfalls, there was now an echoing depth, an aching sorrow between the lines.  These minor characters, struggling to make sense of a labyrinthine plot they could only see fractions of, only to disappear into the wings, unheralded.  And then, to vanish.  To see the lights go out in his eyes—

But that's for a different essay.  This is about the implications of an atheist's death.  Because dad was an atheist, in the most literal way possible: He was a scientist.  He made it his life's work to understand the forces in the universe, and none of them ever pointed to God.  More to the point, he didn't believe in the afterlife.  The brain was the mind; there were no informational fields that existed beyond when the brain stopped spitting out tiny pulses of electricity.  The Self, the core of identity, disappears.  And he was right.

Some people, when faced with another's death, start believing that their spirit watches over, or is "present" in some sense, or has "gone to a better place" – for them, any sort of continuation of the narrative is better than nothing.  But that's not what I discovered.  I found that gap you can't see.  All I sense is the absence of presence.  Nothing more.  Watching dad die, and continuing my own life only shows me he's not there.  He didn't "go away", he just stopped.  All we have now are the marks he made in the world to show a mind once existed. 

As least I'm fortunate, in that he left a lot of marks.

[Freeky]

Beautiful, man.

[Elder Iptuous]

powerful words, LMNO.

it seems almost like a cold comfort that, as atheists (or at least those who simply do not believe in an afterlife) that life and death are both elevated in significance, and perhaps meaning, in a sense.  the discontinuity a singular point of irrefutable weight that an eternal existence would lack.

also, i would like to say it is inspiring to see the positive influence that your father is to you, evidenced by your writings here.
i hope to be as good a father to my sons as he is to you.
i'd like to thank you for this.

[Luna]

Well said, LMNO.