You and I will not "die"

Well, of course, there will come a time when we are no longer visibly around, when we no longer speak or write new emails.  But when that time comes, our friends and relatives will re-circulate old emails and play recordings and videos of us, maybe even some from our childhood.  Is Humphrey Bogart dead?  In the usual sense of the word, yes, since 1957, according to the Wikipedia.  But I am trying to focus on non-usual senses of the word, senses that show the fact that aspects of a person can persist importantly regardless of the fact they have stopped breathing.   We can still see Humphrey.  Look here, for instance.

 

Well, but Humphrey was famous and is “immortalized” in film but you and I aren’t.  Maybe we are.  We know each other.  Besides, check yourself out.  Look in Google and Google Images.  Check the CIA, the FBI, your records at the bank and in your doctor’s and lawyer’s office.  You could be in all of those places and many others I don’t know about.  It is a big job just finding all the parts of you!

 

My daughter, my mother, my stepfather, my father, my grandfather, my grandmother and many others I had known and loved have died.  But, I have each of them in my head.  Their appearance, their ideas, their principle and their genes are in me now.  Are they “gone”?  Not at all.

 

Between memories and artifacts like letters and sewing and carpentry and art they made, parts of them are still here.  Before they had gone through the state-change from “live” to “dead”, most of the time during my adult years, I wasn’t near them.  I didn’t see them often and I didn’t hear from them.  Just like now.

 

They even change in my mind and perception.  As I age, I view them differently at different times.  As I go through changes of opinion and emphasis, so do they.  Just like then.

 

Sometimes, the most helpful image of a person is that of an amoeba.

 

We are of a shifting shape, with indistinct and changing boundaries.  We spread over to here and reach to there.  We expand and contract.  We extend through time and space and change locations.  No wonder it is so difficult to cease to exist.