à l'éternité

 My dad has been having a lot of mental confusion lately due to his brain cancer. Yesterday it was particularly bad. But there was one fleeting and precious moment when the fog lifted a bit and he was suddenly completely lucid. 

We were walking over to a restaurant a block from our house. As my dad often does in his current condition, he would walk a few feet, then have an idea and pause to explain it to me. 

Yesterday, as he was ambling along, he suddenly halted and turned to me, saying: "You know, I think our family will be okay at the end of all this." 

I smiled, even as my stomach twisted inwardly in an agony of sympathy. "Yeah, I agree, dad. I think so."

Dad walked a few more steps, then paused again and turned back to me. "Of course," he added, "we'll miss each other. And I don't want to miss each other." 

He walked a few more steps, then paused again. "But I feel like maybe we'll meet again somehow. In eternity."

Somehow I managed not to burst into tears then and there, but to just hug him and agree with him and continue to steer him toward the restaurant—though my appetite was shot for the rest of the evening. 

While we were having dinner, I started to notice that his speech was slowing and getting quieter. He seemed to have more trouble chewing his food than I'd ever seen before. 

I had our meals boxed up and paid the bill, as this didn't seem to be going in a good direction. I stood next to him and said: "Dad, I think we should start walking home." 

"Why do we have to go home now?" he said in a small voice—hunched over far to one side in a posture I'd never seen before, but which didn't seem good. 

"It seems like maybe you're getting tired," I said, again encouraging him again to stand. That's when he started emitting a strange groan I'd never heard before, and his arms tensed up and started to shake. 

"Dad, you're having a seizure!" I said, while dialing 911 with the other hand. The restaurant staff and a patron with nursing experience lowered him onto the floor, where they turned him on his side and made sure his airway was clear. 

Eventually, the paramedics got him to the ER. He was awake and seemingly okay by the time my mom and I went home exhausted to crash, four hours later. 

He survived that episode. But the seizure seems hard to interpret as anything other than a sign that we have entered a new stage of deterioration from the glioblastoma. 

And his pausing to turn to me in the street to tell me that we would miss each other, but that he hoped we'd meet again somehow, seemed to me now like a final word. He knew already on some level that something was not right internally—that something was about to happen at that dinner. 

The rest of the night last night I kept replaying his words in the street. They just seemed somehow like his sign-off message to the rest of us. 

All the rest of the evening, I couldn't repeat them to anyone without crying. I have not otherwise cried once up to this point, in the four months since my dad's diagnosis. 

But when I tried to relay to my mom what dad had said in the street on the way to the restaurant, I suddenly caught myself barking out sobs. I was ugly-crying, as they say. I couldn't even get through the words "in eternity."

The same thing happened when I tried to tell my sister. 

"It was just so sweet and touching," I told her; "and it meant a lot to hear him say it. He's been getting so confused and frustrated these past weeks, and there have been times when I've thought 'how much of dad is still in there?' But this was so obviously him, and he had a message for us." 

The other thing I told her: "There's some non-literal sense in which I think he's right." About us meeting again somehow, I mean, after death. 

In what sense? I've been trying to puzzle that out ever since. 

I mean, he didn't say we'd meet "in heaven"; he said "in eternity." 

And I do think he will always exist in a kind of eternity—a species of eternity, in Spinoza's terms. 

We'll meet again sub specie aeternitatis in the Spinozan sense—in the sense, that is, that the universe exists in four dimensions, and that if we could see it as it is; see it as a whole—not from the uni-directional standpoint of our individual timeline with its arrow pressing forward, but from the standpoint of the cosmos—we could see that nothing that has even been can cease to exist. 

We'll meet again in the sense that whatever "having been must ever be," to quote Wordsworth. That "they also live who swerve and vanish in the river," to quote Archibald MacLeish. That to have happened at all is to happen forever, if we could but step back and view our whole Einsteinian four-dimensional universe under a species of eternity. 

"So long as you are alive you are just the moment, perhaps, but when you are dead you are all your life from the first moment to the last..." says a character in H.G. Wells's The World Set Free. 

In that sense, I do think we'll meet again. 

There are all these tech billionaires and "longevity influencers" right now obsessing over how to extend their individual existences indefinitely in our one timeline. They have every one of them so completely lost the plot. 

Nothing can last forever in the direction of time's arrow. From the individual perspective, "nothing can bring back the hour," as Wordsworth wrote. "[N]or all your Piety nor Wit / shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, / Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it" says FitzGerald's Rubaiyat. 

But from the perspective of the universe—an intellect that could hold the whole thing in view at once—nothing is ever lost. We are all immortal already—if we but knew it—and without the aid of any quack miracle cures. What has been must ever be. 

I am reminded of a passage from Whitman—which I recall saving mentally years ago, because it reminds me so much of my dad and his worldview. This seems to me what all the longevity influencers and billionaire bros dreaming of the fountain of youth seem to have missed:

 What do you think has become of the young and old men?

  And what do you think has become of the women and children?

  They are alive and well somewhere,

  The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,

  And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the

      end to arrest it,

  And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

  All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,

  And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

  Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?

  I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.