The thing I hate about death is that it is able to make such an absolute change in the universe. Absolute and forever. It doesn't seem that anything should have that much power.

Even if we assume a life after death, under only the most childish conception of what that would involve, can we imagine the same person persisting. As if death just meant moving across town.

The person that dies disappears forever from the universe. That personality, that character, that combination of experience and interaction with the particulars of a life, will never be seen again. An immortal soul may endure, but whatever an immortal soul may be, it is something larger and more general than the particulars of a personality.

Death is absolute and forever. Damn it.

The world unfolds, as it has for uncountable millennia. At some point in this unfolding drama we appear, as if from nowhere. An event of irreducible mystery. We persist for a flicker of a moment, and then we are gone. The world will never be the same. That event will never be repeated, and cannot be captured and frozen, except as an amber specimen of memory. And when the memories die, the event passes into history. History is our attempt to cheat death, which is why it holds such fascination. But memory and history are mere models of that which is gone forever. Death is absolute.

And unexpected death is even worse. It loosens our grip on our sense that we understand this universe. That we have managed to organize it all into a consistent system, with everything in its place. Unexpected death undoes all that. It throws things out of kilter. Renders a body-blow to our sense that we understand anything at all. I hate that too.

Expected death is usually a little more tidy. An expected death is a part of life. "We all have to die sometime." And in this perverse day and time even sudden, violent death has come to be expected, in a way. We have a category for that. We can fit it in somewhere. It's a tragedy and a waste, and causes us to despair just a little more about this world. But we understand it, all too well. But a genuinely unexpected death is something else again.

Someone wakes up one morning with a high fever; by the end of the day they feel bad enough to present themselves to the hospital. The next day they die. Caught a flu virus its seems, and for unknowable reasons the body's immune system failed to recognize the alien intruder. Did not respond. Did not defend itself. The breath and life smothered out by a flu virus--before anyone realized what was happening. I have no category for that.

Burial, like history, is an attempt to cheat death. The archaic record suggests humankind has practiced ritual burial since becoming humankind. Indeed, the anthropologists take ritual burial as one of the markers of the transition to civilization. Practices differ, and I wonder if it makes a difference.

Burial in the earth seems designed for a time in which our relationship to the earth was . . . well, more earthy. So a lingering, grounded connection to the earth seemed appropriate. In much of the cultured world that relationship no longer exists. Perhaps something with a faster pace, like cremation, is a more appropriate form of body disposal. Cremation makes it a little harder to maintain the comforting illusion that the person somehow endures. Mummification is the apotheosis of that illusion, cremation its counterpoint. Somewhere in between is burial at sea. No doubt burial at sea arose out of practical necessity, but it trifles with the illusion. And trifling with the illusion is no small matter. Which has why burial at sea has always made us a little uneasy, a little almost squeamish.

Practices differ, and it makes no difference.

Death is absolute and forever. I hate that.