Losing A Loved One

              It is inevitable that all of us will one day lose someone we love. It may not be today, tomorrow, next week, next year…but eventually it will happen. There is so much one can say on the subject of losing someone that it can go in an immeasurable amount of directions. How to deal with losing a loved one the direction this post will take.

              Many people rely on religion, or convert to religion, in order to bare the pain of losing those who are closest to us, while others will reject religion and the terrors portrayed by the unjust god(s). Others will cling to memories and hold onto their loved one who is no longer human for as long as possible, while others will try to move on as quickly as possible.

           How people cope with the death of a person they loved is different for each person and the explanations for death are as varied as people are. Gypsies often believe, for instance, that if one grieves too much, their spirit may come back and haunt you. I always found that a rather interesting view and many cultures can have taboos of death. Some Native Americans, for instance, avoid even speaking of the deceased. In Victorian times mourning was a grand event for women, lasting at least a year in most cases and everything down to attire and social etiquette was dictated to for the grieving woman and family to remind the person constantly of their loss.

            When a person once loved has died, I prefer to find comfort in what I know, what I can see and understand. In some ways, I do believe in reincarnation, but how I believe in it is up in the air. When it comes to coping with the death of a loved one, I like the quote by Aaron Freeman, whom I will now close this post with:

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed.

You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got. And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you.

 And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever. And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.

And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly. Amen.

 - Aaron Freeman