Thank you for sharing your heart with us, zaph. My grandma passed into nonexistence last year. The pastor at the funeral preached a sermon on the immediate ascension doctrine—that she was not, as some christians claim, sleeping until the return of christ, but instantly ascended to heaven. Perhaps this was comforting to some who believed not only the bible but his particular church’s interpretation thereof.
The only story I can tell that is true is that her family members still remember her. I sometimes fantasize that her actual memories can somehow be retrieved, along with those of my grandpa, by analyzing the reflected electromagnetic signals from interstellar dust—but this is such a tenuous possibility that it makes cryonics look rock-solid by comparison. The reality is that I can only disapprove of death, not pretend it out of existence.
Thanks Isparrish. It was pretty hard to get all of that out. Your grandmother’s funeral sermon sounds like so many other funerals that I’ve attended. The need to pretend death out of existence just seems so central to what religious approaches to death are all about. The other side of it, saying that death is exactly what it seems, feels so daunting. The fact that their memories lives on can feel flimsy, even if it is absolutely true. I don’t have a neat and clean method of dealing with grief, but preserving those memories for yourself I believe is integral, or at least it was for me.
That’s something I really learned from my dad’s life. He was an electron microscopist, and I believe he did some great, if unheralded, work in his lifetime. I believe doing good work in general, in any number of different fields, can add to the general good in the world. Add to that loving people you have in your life, anyone has tremendous potential for adding to the good of the world.
Thank you for sharing your heart with us, zaph. My grandma passed into nonexistence last year. The pastor at the funeral preached a sermon on the immediate ascension doctrine—that she was not, as some christians claim, sleeping until the return of christ, but instantly ascended to heaven. Perhaps this was comforting to some who believed not only the bible but his particular church’s interpretation thereof.
The only story I can tell that is true is that her family members still remember her. I sometimes fantasize that her actual memories can somehow be retrieved, along with those of my grandpa, by analyzing the reflected electromagnetic signals from interstellar dust—but this is such a tenuous possibility that it makes cryonics look rock-solid by comparison. The reality is that I can only disapprove of death, not pretend it out of existence.
Thanks Isparrish. It was pretty hard to get all of that out. Your grandmother’s funeral sermon sounds like so many other funerals that I’ve attended. The need to pretend death out of existence just seems so central to what religious approaches to death are all about. The other side of it, saying that death is exactly what it seems, feels so daunting. The fact that their memories lives on can feel flimsy, even if it is absolutely true. I don’t have a neat and clean method of dealing with grief, but preserving those memories for yourself I believe is integral, or at least it was for me.
Memory is flimsy, but the good that people do can have effects which last for quite a while, even if it isn’t connected to their names.
That’s something I really learned from my dad’s life. He was an electron microscopist, and I believe he did some great, if unheralded, work in his lifetime. I believe doing good work in general, in any number of different fields, can add to the general good in the world. Add to that loving people you have in your life, anyone has tremendous potential for adding to the good of the world.