The Law on the Conservation of Energy

Maybe it was synchronicity.

It was a Friday night when I heard that Marguerite had died, and I’d spent most of that day preoccupied with entropy. I was looking for a definition I could understand—something at a Grade 7 comprehension level, and in less than two pages. Like Cabinet Documents.

I’d heard on a podcast (so it must be true) that “entropy” was one of the most misunderstood words “in the English Language”.

That seemed rather broad, given the use of the word “fulsome” in government press releases. The 'expert' on the podcast claimed that "Text Books" in the olden days defined entropy as disorder. So now even people who weren’t born in those olden days, were using entropy as a synonym for chaos.

I didn’t know anything about entropy, one way or the other, even though I was born in the olden days. But all I learned from my High School encounters with quadratic relations and trigonometry was that I should drop the hard sciences and focus on the humanities.

But I realized I had room on my OAP dance card, between all the crafting, volunteer work with Women in Need, and Googling the early signs of dementia. I had the time to do a little online research. Something that didn’t involve Taylor Swift’s latest feud, or how someone who used to be young got old (and you'll never believe what they look like!). So I started to investigate entropy.

This is life when you’re no longer a card-carrying member of the hive. As your total time dwindles, your usable time expands.

Worker-bees (may their marginal tax rates multiply) don’t have the time or tendency to finish the Daily Jumble® in the Times Colonic, much less go to the light at the end of a ‘Word of the Day’ tunnel. They’re too busy wrangling whiners. Or commuting to cubicles where they bang their heads against new-and-improved software while preparing for 360 degree reviews based on their recently rewritten job-descriptions. They’re seized by tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’s petty-paced creep from day-to-chaotic-day.

But tomorrow looks a whole lot more like today through a pensioner’s bifocals. We’ve got time to drill down on entropy, or to finish reading Gary Zukav—third time lucky, maybe.

If your faith in intelligent design is reinforced by the miracle of reverse-mortgages, then you’re more likely to be jetting off to the River Jordan's trickle with your pastor from the Prosperity Gospel Mega Dome and his striking-but-pious wife.

Some of us—and there’s a chromosomal bias here—get together in open and nurturing settings to explore the profound sub-texts of Eat, Pray, Love.

And—because the Bell Curve is another gift of the Divine—some of us will push the envelope on metaphysics just by raising the yard-arm on cocktail hour.

Me? I was hot on the trail of impractical wisdom while my dear fried was dying, or getting ready to die, or newly dead. I can’t be ashamed of that. And besides, I succeeded. I can say with confidence—at least until the next new study is published—that energy tends to expand, and entropy is the measurement of that expansion. It's just another unusual tidbit of trivia that will cling to the wrinkles of my brain [2] like cheap toilet paper in a Charmin’ Ultra commercial, waiting for the day I can pick it off and earn a pie-slice in Trivial Pursuit: Junior Physicist Edition.

Anyway. I was in a good mood when I noticed the missed call from Lesley. But I was in a very different mood a few minutes later, after we'd talked.

I’m no grief-virgin. Both my parents are dead, and those are big junctions for most of us. I’ve lost close friends to vehicle collisions and cancer. One was trapped in the bite on a logging show. There have been murders, suicides, and drug overdoses. And I can’t explain why sometimes it hurts more than others. Maybe it’s simply the aging process. Maybe our emotional joints are worn down over time, like our hips and knees. But the wait-list for psychic replacement surgery never gets shorter.

The Prophet (peace be upon him), said it’s ignorance that causes us to lament the dead; we’re forgetting those (72) virgins. But I don’t think virgins would be the right fit for Marguerite; I suspect she’d prefer fellas who’d passed their probation at least. Although, I read on Islamweb.net that Allah knows women’s longing for men is not as strong as men’s longing for women (so that must be true). As a consequence, they prefer jewels to men. Paradise--so they say--is loaded with jewels [Quran 43:18]. So I should stop the wailing and gnashing of teeth and be happy, I guess. Even though Marguerite wasn’t big on jewelry.

Siddhartha the Buddha said we can escape grief if we would only—once and for all—accept impermanence. I am one of Sid's big fans, but that's tricky--accepting impermanence.

Matthew (prior to Fact-check.org) quotes Jesus' twitter about the many rooms in his dad’s mansion. So, the Christian dead should be comfortable, presuming each room has an en-suite. And if that isn’t enough to bring a smile to the face of those left-behind, well that's okay. Jeez also tells us that mourners will be blesséd. I'm assuming that's better than plain old 'blessed' without an accent. Everything's better with an accent. Ask the Jean-Paul Belmondo fans. Or, for the younger demographic, Idris Elba.

The Bhagavad Gita has the official account of Krishna’s pep-talk to Arjuna as the Pandava and Kaurava armies face each other before the Battle of Kurukshetra. Arjuna has a problem I know we’ve all had to deal with at one time or another. He had to choose between killing his entire family, friends, and the inevitable innocent civilians, or running away. Takes us all right back, doesn't it?

Luckily, Krishna reminds him that the wise never grieve for the dead or the living, because there never was a time when everyone didn’t and won’t exist. It's simple, when you put it that way.

Despite those jewels of wisdom from higher up the food chain, I'm more in line with the old wordsmith and ale-taster, Bill Shakespeare. He said, “Everyone can master grief, except he who has it.” Take that, Kubler-Ross.

I saw a psychiatrist for 20 years, give or take. I’d still be seeing him if he hadn’t caught cancer and died just as he was hitting his nonagenarian stride. He told me that his mother was a great believer in Heaven and Earth and All Things Visible and Invisible. And she promised him that she would come to him after she died, like Jesus to Thomas. He—being a psychiatrist—was a faithless heathen, and probably a communist. He was certainly an NDPer.

“I waited for years,” he told me. “But I’ve never heard from her.” Not even an E card. And you can’t GET any lazier than an E card.

Marguerite and I had many conversation over the last 30 years about death and dying. But it was mostly about my death and my fear of dying—it’s very helpful when you have a friend who recognizes that everything is always about you. In the few minutes that we talked about her, I got the idea that she didn’t expect 24/7 harp concerts after life on earth, but she wasn't too occupied with her post-life arrangements.

Still, I’m saddened when I think about Marguerite waking up in the dark, alone and in pain ... and afraid. Cuz who wouldn't be afraid? So I try to limit how often I think about those things. And when those thoughts do intrude, I try to remember that her pain was impermanent, and grief is blesséd. I remind myself that there’s no reason to lament her death, because everyone’s always dead and alive anyway, and besides there’s so much virgin-fucking and so many jewelry parties going on in the mansion's many rooms, that nobody’s got time to suffer.

But the thing that works best for me is when I remember The Law of Conservation of Energy. That's the factoid I picked up during my snipe hunt for entropy. The Law of Conservation of Energy says energy cannot be created or destroyed; it is only transformed.

I’m not on the dualism bandwagon (je suis désolé, M. Descartes). I believe—at least until the next new study is published—that we're all one. Definitely, each of us individually is one, and possibly all of us together--with the rocks, the oceans, the planets, and the Trump familly--is one.

I don’t believe in a soul. At least not the one described by Sister St. Pius, in Grade 2. (Spoiler alert: it’s kidney shaped, and white, except for the black marks that are your sins. And it floats around in your thorax).

I like to believe that we are all energy. And energy expands, like a flashlight pointing up at the night sky. Expanding and changing, but never created or destroyed. And, as odd as it may seem, that gives me comfort.

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[1] The ridges are called gyri and the crevices are called sulci. Just another couple of zingers I’m saving for a money game of TP.