Winter                                                      Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

The oldest cousin on my mother’s side died on Christmas Eve.  Isaac, Ike, Jones always had a special place in the family as the first child of my mom’s five siblings.   The last of mom’s siblings, my Aunt Roberta, died several years ago and we cousins became the older generation.  Now, for the first time, death has invaded our numbers.

Ike’s death was, in many ways, a blessing.  A victim of a nasty spinal condition that left his head permanently inclined forward, Ike suffered a bad fall in March and never really recovered.  In the end his lungs gave out.  We weren’t close, perhaps he was the most distant of all the cousins, but he’s still family, part of us and now part of our memories.

No one really knows what death, the most shrouded ancientrail is like.  Does life just wink out with the last breath, the last heartbeat, the last brainwave?  Jews believe the spirit stays around the body for a few days, thus the careful and personal treatment a corpse receives in traditional Jewish practice.  My friend, Gyatsho, believed that after 49 days his soul got a new incarnation based on karma and the attitude near death.  Many people in the obituaries believe the dead meet Jesus, or go to heaven, or greet family and friends who died before them.

You never see it in the obituaries but some believe in a place of eternal punishment, the last fork on the ancientrail leading to hell.

I have no idea what happens after death though the most likely thing to me is extinction.  We simply become no more as a Self, eventually dispersing our elements back to the universe from which they came.

The Greeks, it seems to me, had the most cogent idea; that is, we live in our deeds, our family, our legacy.  Even so, for most of us, the legacy will not amount to much, perhaps a generation’s remembrance at Thanksgiving meals, family reunions.  Then, we’ll become one of those sepia photos  a later generation will pick up and say, “Who was this?”

Or, perhaps not.  It’s possible that the internet has become an engine of immortality, allowing our words, pictures, even our consumer habits to live on, perhaps in the cloud?  In this case perhaps my great-grandchild will access Ancientrails much as you do, reading of one life, at least the bits and pieces that end up on a page or in photographs.  What might we call this?  ByteLife.  CyberMemory.  Life in the Cloud.  SiliconeForever. (no, wait, that’s those breast implants.)  Life According to Electricity.