With Aunt Inez - 1942

I have a friend who believes in reincarnation. I told her once, “If the Alex that I am now does not remember that he was once a camel and when this Alex dies and the hippopotamus he becomes does not remember he was a Alex before, of what use is the concept?”

That I am a conscious being that became so because a little sperm got into an ovum I consider to be a miracle (with a big M). This ability to be an old man and still marvel at such a miracle is what makes me wow at every plant scan I do almost every day. I have at least 4000 of them and each one is a miracle.

 

Rosa ' A Shropshire Lad'  21 October 2025

 When my Rosemary died on December 9, 2020, 6 minutes before she did she asked, “Am I dying?” I was unable to answer.

Without revealing our religious beliefs (she was raised an Anglican and I was as a Roman Catholic) we both knew, with a personal assurance, that we would never see each other again.

Until recently I did not know that my thoughts on life and death are exactly like that of Arthur Schopenhauer who stated:

 "After your death you will be what you were before your birth,"

After that little sperm entered that ovum, I believe that the first photograph of me is one where I am in the arms of my father’s older sister, Aunt Inez.

Thinking about death, and anybody who lived in Mexico for 21 years, thinks a lot about it.  Mexicans do not avoid the thought and celebrate death, I believe that the problem is one of language. By language I mean any language. Our ability to begin to think, that happens perhaps months after a doctor slaps us to make us cry, is the limitation of thought. Epicurus neatly said that death brings no pain so one should not fear death.

The problem with death is that is impossible (I would stress that word) to imagine one being in a state of no thought, no feeling, no scent, no vision which is what oblivion really is. Darwin told us that we all want to preserve or genes which is why we have offspring. I think that that in those genes there is a prohibition for imagining that we are not alive.                                      

As I have written here before my favourite composition of Astor Piazzolla is his Oblivion. He spoke perfect English and he knew that Spanish has not equivalent term for that word. “ Olvido” to forget is not even close. And furthermore English has a neat synonym of oblivion which is nothingness. Nothingness translates as nada. Nada is not nothingness.

All the above is to cut to the quick which is that every time I bed rot with my two cats, and particularly at night, I try not to think that I will soon join Rosemary. I will not join her. We will share an oblivion that will not be felt.