In memoriam, Boobie, June 18, 1991-July 21, 2005, lovingly remembered and terribly missed on the anniversary of his death

It was hard to believe:
holding you that last day,
the breath gone from you,
everything about you still.
I knew it was coming;
the decision was mine to make.
By my nod, you went quietly, painlessly finally.
After fourteen years, you were no longer of this world.
I held you for the last time, and wept the loss...
as I do still,
as I stop to remember,
always to remember,
the good years, the wonderful years when I had you,
consigned to memory now,
in a world so suddenly different,
so suddenly changed,
so suddenly cold.

Are we just cockroaches, Part 2

Every once in a while, when I feel overwhelmed by everything, thinking of lives that I have lost and dreams that have died and things that will never be, I come to realize just how insignificant I actually am, how little and meaningless and insignificant my grief, my concerns, and my aspirations are in a world which has seen countless lives lost over billions of years.

From the thousands of deaths in the recent China earthquake to the hundreds who met their watery deaths at sea with the ill-fated Princess of the Stars, lives have come and gone with barely a whisper in the immeasurable expanse of time. Why should we then think of ourselves as so important, so special just because we can think and create and remember?

This sense of self-importance, a major feature of the Christian religion that proclaims man to have been made in the image of God, should bring honest men and women to ask: What, if anything at all, makes us so important?

Honest people, looking into themselves, at the history of the planet, and at the whole range of possibilities in the universe, should come to the same painful conclusion: NOTHING, NOTHING AT ALL. Nothing differentiates us from the pigs that become our (your) meat or the dead cockroach that we throw unceremoniously into the wastebasket. In the end, it seems, we are here simply to live out our days and die, just like every kind of life that we know of.

Which makes the the promise of an afterlife more appealling, perhaps even necessary if we are indeed to lead good lives.

But what if there is no afterlife? As asked before, why should we be entitled to an afterlife when we refuse to accord such a possibility to creatures that are more beautiful and innocent and kind than we are or could ever be?

Perhaps we deserve no afterlife.

But if there is no afterlife, what consolation is there? Are we just cockroaches that crawl, are stepped on, then die?

Think about it this way: either way, afterlife or not, death should be a boon. If, after this existence, we do meet the loved ones who had gone before us, then well and good. If, however, all is nothingness come death, maybe just as well. If we are indeed just cockroaches, then death should be a blessing. The very thought that it would all be over should be consolation enough. After all, with the peace of nothingness, who needs the burden of consciousness?

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When life was complete

This beautiful card was made by my daughter Cristine and was given to me on Father's Day, June 15, 2003.
More than just a Father's Day card, it is a picture of a life that was once complete: a family surrounded by cats and three wonderful dogs.
Life was good then.
Before my father-in-law died in July 2003.
Before my father died in 2004.
Before Boobie died in 2005.
Before the last of my cats died in 2005
Before Prudence died in 2006.
Before Almond died in 2007.
My daughter didn't know it then, and neither did I, but with her card she made the last depiction of my life when it was complete.
This card, old and and worn as it is, is precious.

They who love little

An employee in the company I work for was buried today. I never knew her. She was on a mountain in Zambales province with her mountaineering friends, crossing a creek, when she was swept away by the rampaging waters brought about by typhoon Fensheng. That was Sunday, June 22. Her body was found some time Monday morning. Jhoanna, as her name was, was an only child. She was also single.

How bleak the world must be today for her parents. When you lose your only child, what have you left? Where lies your consolation in a world gone mad, a life suddenly turned upside down? Darkness comes more grimly somehow, the silence more oppressively. In times of grief, you survive by holding on to what you have left. But when it is an only child that you lose, finding that "something left" must be next to impossible.

I know the pain of loss. Even with the passage of time, it creeps up on you every now and again, making you pause to reflect on life as it has been ever since such loss--and wonder what is left. As you remember the good days, the days ahead seem even more daunting.

How we who grieve envy those who love little. They never will know the pain, the loss, the utter helplessness and hopelessness that we feel upon a loss. They may lose their loved ones, but they get by well. Their lives, after all, are focused on other things.

And they who love little are not as uncommon as it may seem. Rather, they are everywhere, focused on their careers, on accumulating wealth, on reaping honors, on making discoveries.

In a season of loss, such as I have known, it is easy to envy them--those people whose lives center on their careers, their work, their art, their science. For them, after all, what is there to lose that they cannot have again? Careers can be replaced, so can jobs, so can the outlet for artistic expression or scientific pursuit.

But how do you replace a life? A life lost is lost; there is no replacement. The world changes dramatically, and the change is irreversible.

Indeed, how bleak the world can be for those who have loved much and lost. How envious we become of those who love little. They can never really be hurt.

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Are we just cockroaches, Part 1

Anyone who has mourned the loss of a loved one knows that the single thought that offers the most comfort in times of bereavement, which gives us the strength to go on in the midst of almost unbearable and seemingly unending grief, is the possibility--more than that,the promise--of an afterlife, the continuation of our existence beyond the world as we know it, in a kind of existence we as yet cannot understand--one, however, that will allow us to be with our loved ones again, in a place with no more pain, no more tears, no more parting, no more death. Even atheists can--and perhaps do--believe in a greater consciousness that governs existence in its different planes, maybe not that god preached by Christianity and the other major religions, but a consciousness and intelligence way beyond our comprehension.

But what if there is no afterlife? Or god or that supreme intelligence governing the universe? What if god or that supreme intelligence, if it actually exists, sees us in the same way we see a cockroach, just a pest to be stepped on?

Put a different way, if we do not believe that the life we extinguish with hardly any thought--the cockroach, the mouse, the pig--continue to exist beyond their death in some way, perhaps as some higher existence, why should we believe that our own life, our own consciousness continues after we die?

It is the pinnacle of human arrogance and self-importance to claim an afterlife but at the same time dismiss its possibility for nonhuman life. After all, what makes us different from a cockroach?

In the play "Inherit the Wind," Drummon says, "Mr. Brady, why do you deny the one faculty of man [that] raises him above the other creatures of the earth: the power of his brain to reason? What other merit have we? The elephant is larger; the horse is swifter and stronger; the butterfly is far more beautiful; the mosquito is more prolific. Even the simple sponge is more durable. Or does a sponge think?"

The power to reason. Some would add the ability to empathize: the fact that, unlike most animals (chimpanzees, though, like humans, have been found to be capable of empathy), we can appreciate the fact that another living creature is experiencing pain. Others would add creativity. Perhaps imagination. But they all go back to Drummond's argument on thought, the power to reason, to remember, to create, the very power that makes us believe that we are higher than and separate from nonhuman life ("the one faculty of man [that] raises him above the other creatures of the earth")--the very thing that, unlike nonhuman life, gives us souls, we who have been made "in the image of God."

But think about it. What if there is something, some aspect of existence, that is far higher than the power to reason or to create or to remember? We cannot fathom it because we do not have the ability to do so. What if there is something beyond the power to reason that we, because of our small minds and limited perspectives, cannot even begin to comprehend?

What if, in the grand scheme of things, we were but cockroaches to a far greater intelligence, as much able to understand the language and thought of such intelligence as a cockroach is able to understand or appreciate the poetry of Yeats?

What if all the things we are so proud of, such as our thought and reason and creativity, are simply the crawling movements of a pesky cockroach to some greater intelligence that is capable of far, far more than we can even imagine?

Such greater intelligence would probably find it laughable, that we in our arrogance and unmitigated sense of self-importance would think ourselves worthy of the sympathy and appreciation of an intelligence responsible for the birth and death of planets and galaxies, or for the birth and death of countless lives for billions of years on our one planet alone. To such greater intelligence, it would be laughable for us to believe in an afterlife just as it would be laughable to many of us to think that cockroaches would actually believe in an afterlife for themselves, a place and time where every dead cockroach would gather in a paradise of their own--no more stepping feet or foul insecticides, just a free-roaming cockroach paradise.

Funny? So perhaps would our aspiration for an afterlife be to an intelligence that sees us in the same way we see cockroaches.

The thought itself can be distressing. If it were so, there would be no point to life. There would be no point to law or morality or ethics or decency. There would be no point to order, no point at all to kindness or mercy, no point even to beauty. After all, it all goes to naught. No reunions after this life, no paradise, no meeting of lovers and loved ones after death.

Ashes to ashes, nothing more. Like a dead cockroach being thrown into a waste basket and eventually being eaten up by ants.

When we pray to "God" or to that higher consciousness, why doesn't "God" or that higher consciousness answer? "Do you not hear me?" Pharoah asks in "The Ten Commandments." Indeed, does "God" not hear? Then again, do we hear the cockroach? Is there perhaps a cry for help every time we move to step on a cockroach?

This thought, however, distressing as it may be, should also be humbling. Shorn of the human arrogance promoted by the world's major religions, which places human beings at the pinnacle of existence, the thought of ourselves as some greater intelligence's cockroach might help us find the humility to co-exist with other inhabitants of this planet, to treat their lives and death with respect, knowing all to well that there is no difference between the death of a cockroach and the death of a human being, both instances being the end of life for something that had once been alive, and in the end being of no consequence to the higher beings with greater power and intelligence in a universe and existence we know very, very little of.

Are we made in the image of God, or are we just cockroaches to a higher intelligence?

Put a different way: If you were God, would you reflect yourself as a cockroach?

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