On Eddies, Becoming and the Stories We Tell About Death

It is just over a year now since Dad passed. Time does not heal. All it does is provide more opportunities to keep busy and temporarily forget. But lately I have been wrestling with the concept of death, trying to make sense of a world where one moment you can be here, and then things go on as if you never were. Part of what makes death so difficult to comprehend is that the world does not seem to acknowledge it. The sun still rises, the clouds roll indifferently across the sky. After four days of family responsibility leave, my emails still need to be answered, I must still negotiate the daily stream of traffic to work. The fact that the extraordinary figure of my father existed seems not to matter at all. I have been running from the questions, I think. Not because I am afraid of the answers, but because asking them entails facing the enormous void where my father was while still integrating into a world careless of that void.

I feel myself tearing up even as I write this. But I must write it. That is how I make sense of my world. So in the next few posts I will unpack my thoughts on the subject of life and death so that I can put the disconnected fragments of thought I have on the subject into something that is hopefully a little more coherent. When the pieces all join maybe I will find a measure of comfort there. Maybe not. Perhaps it will be that the very act of writing compels a confrontation with reality that moves me closer to acceptance. Perhaps I might even come closer to finding where God resides in the midst of death. That remains to be seen.

Last week I attended the funeral of a two-year old child, tragically killed in a motor accident. That tiny coffin exposed how utterly empty our attempts are to make death “mean” something. The assurances that this is somehow part of a greater plan lose all coherence. If theology cannot stand in the face of such reality without resorting to clichés that negate the suffering rather than addressing it, then it simply becomes a self-serving fiction. We need a theology that can sit with loss and unanswered questions without feeling the need to explain pain away, a theology that is more like a lament than a solution. And building that kind of theology requires us to begin by having the courage to look squarely at reality.

I acknowledge that cultural rituals and stories often arise from genuine human need and love. They are our collective attempt to hold ourselves up in the face of the abyss. There is something beautiful and noble in that. But to be truthful I also need to acknowledge the problematic sociological foundations on which religion and culture are built. Religion and culture try to keep things stable, so they interpret reality for us in ways that preserve what is. They provide stories that assure of who we are, how the world works and what matters. They provide the comfort of scripts for our roles in these stories. But death disrupts these stories. This rupture threatens the stability that the stories bring, and so religion and culture must, of necessity, attempt to control death and how we are to understand it. They contain us within rituals that make us feel less alone and beguile us with stories that minimise the loss it brings by promising deferred meaning. Sometimes they use death itself as a threat to keep society from fragmenting. Religion and culture need death even as they fear it.

So my starting point cannot be to use the stories of my religion and culture to make sense of death. Those stories have an agenda. I must be cautious. My starting point must be what is.

A cautionary note to self: seeing what “is” is also complicated by stories. Everything we experience is filtered through some form of metanarrative that orders the chaos, filtering what is worth focusing on from that which is peripheral. There is no pristine reality available to us before interpretation. I cannot simply remove the stories through which I have learned to see and suddenly encounter the world unmediated. I carry language, culture, memory and expectation with me. Even the things I choose to notice are shaped by prior assumptions. There is no view from nowhere. But that does not mean that all interpretations are equally good. Some are a great deal more robustly rooted in facts and logic than others.

Reality gets a vote. However compelling an idea might be, however comforting its implications, it remains accountable to what actually is. So I will not begin by investigating what my theology says ought to be true. I will look at what is and discover to what extent my theology can survive contact with what is.

We have become used to seeing the world as a collection of things – stars, trees, people, animals. But increasingly, discoveries in modern science make the old picture of the world as a collection of discrete, autonomous things difficult to sustain. Modern science increasingly invites us to see the world not simply as things, but as processes, relationships, fields and interactions.

Alan Watts uses a compelling analogy to explain it. When you look at an eddy in a stream, it may well seem that it has a distinct, recognisable shape. However, the water molecules inside it are constantly shifting and moving. People – all things, for that matter – are, he argues, precisely the same. They seem to sustain a distinct shape, but the reality is that what may resemble a stable, isolated entity is in fact a dynamic but temporary configuration in a greater field of energy, light and atoms. We are more actions in the field than we are objects within it.

If I look at an eddy in the river today, and look at it again tomorrow, what makes it the same eddy? The water molecules are not the same molecules. The water is constantly moving and the boundaries are fluid, yet days later I will be able to return to it and confidently assert: that is the eddy I saw. In the flux, what is it that recognisably persists? The eddy’s identity is not dependent on retaining the same molecules. What persists is not the substance but the pattern. Rather than being a collection of molecules, the eddy is the way the water is moving. Perhaps the same can be said of us too. Perhaps what I call “myself” is more than merely the collection of atoms that currently constitute my body, but the pattern of relationships, processes, dispositions and consciousness that gather those atoms into something recognisably “me”.

This raises another interesting question: why does the pattern persist at all? The river is moving, yet the eddy does not dissolve into the surrounding water immediately. Something about the conditions of the system allow the pattern to maintain itself; somehow there is temporarily stability to the pattern even though nothing within it is static. What allows the patten to persist, and what determines when it is no longer able to do so?

Perhaps we have been looking at things all wrong. We imagine that things exist and then undergo processes of change. But perhaps things are what change temporarily looks like. Perhaps processes are more fundamental than things, so that what we call a “thing” is merely a temporarily stable pattern within an ongoing process. The noun, the English teacher in me observes, is a snapshot of the verb.

At the most fundamental level, then, we are relational. Certainly, the eddy has an individual identity of sorts, but it can only be understood within the context of the river. And the river itself can only be understood within the context of a greater fluvial system that shapes and is shaped by the landscape through which the river journeys, joined by tributaries and emptying into the sea.

So here is fragment number 1: When the eddy disappears, the river does not stop flowing. The molecules that temporarily configured in the form of the eddy are not gone but simply configured differently.  That is cold comfort, though. While the molecules may not be gone, the arrangement, the unique, unrepeatable form that was my father, is.

Still, if human beings – along with all things – are temporary patterns rather than autonomous substances, what does that imply about life and death? Could it be that death is not the opposite of life, as I have always assumed? Perhaps life is not something we possess that is ended by the event of death, but rather a process of becoming into which death has been woven all along. And if the molecules remain even as the pattern dissipates, what is it exactly that dies?