We lose the moon first

I am discussing the heat death of the universe. My student and I hover briefly on the Big Crunch. We cannot contrive a source of energy immense enough to make the totality of creation, metaphorically speaking, come again to an incomprehensible point. Either way that would be the end of all possible life we can fathom, short of sliding into a more convivial dimension. The curtain would be closed on this accident of physics with no guarantee of an encore, let alone one that sapient life might attend.

My student, a devout teenage nihilist, born decades too late for his natural home, Seattle's grunge scene, snarks about the pointlessness of everything, knowing this inevitable end.

"I'm going to die," he says. "Why should I care?"

"I care," I reply. "Do you care if I die?"

A moment of genuine, uncharacteristic hesitation possesses him. As one of the few people in his life for whom he has ever cared, I know this is my trump card.

"Yes," he solemnly pronounces.

"So, right now -- you and me talking -- matters, even if we can't help dying and being forgotten by a universe that will not survive. And dying -- knowing we will -- drives us to create and help. It makes us better. Maybe that's all we can do: the best we can even if it won't matter in the grand scheme."

Putting aside the fatal grandeur of the universe, our bodies are the abode of death. We are nervous about acknowledging our physical forms as being a part of us since they will one day fail and, as far as anyone can know for sure, end our earthly existences. Instead, we pretend that our bodies are vehicles we ride, operated from some space behind our eyes.

My teacher showed us a film strip about mummies when I was in kindergarten. It was the mid-eighties, thus the age of film strips and curious pedagogy. I cannot now fathom what she was thinking in doing this. What was the educational value of showing us the vacant sockets of desiccated corpses? I had just learned to read, but my imagination tended closer to magic than the embalmed.

This filmstrip marked a fork in my life. For the first time, I realized that not only I would die, but so would everyone I had ever loved. Mortality was a ride from which there was no escape, only procrastination. This was a heavy burden to lay upon the little boy who had hidden under the piano because he was too anxious around strangers. I could not articulate any of this, not with my language then, but the idea haunted me for years. Elementary schoolers do not excel at resolving existential crises, so it merely festered without a straightforward way to alleviate it or explain to my classmates that they had just wasted another precious day peeing their pants from spinning too fast on the merry-go-round.

Maybe this contributed to my early adoption of the paranormal. If there were ghosts and aliens, perhaps there was a way out of this quandary.

In high school, I discovered transhumanism, the philosophy that the human body is an impediment from which we could recover. I did not devote myself to the sciences, materially contributing to this future's promise. Still, I invested in it my relief that I may not need to worry about senescence and death. I wasn't the sort of religious where I could high-five Jesus on the way out and hope that was enough to save my immortal soul, but I had seen science myself and had hope for its progress toward technological immortality.

I don't see it as likely now.

My therapist asked me once if I feared dying. I laughed. Fear of death is an essential part of the human condition. It is why most of us do anything at all. (I could be trusted with immortality, though, since I like learning and creating and could do well with more time in which to do it.) She mentioned people using psychotropics to relieve end-of-life fears, but I am still too young to be hitting the LSD for final clarity. Assuming nothing major happens, I have several decades before I ought to be deciding on my burial plans.

I worry about a decrease in functionality more than death. Near the end, both of my long-lived grandmothers fell into dementia, losing themselves before they hit the grave. People joke about beginning to forget things at forty. I am just starting to figure things out and think properly due to finally getting the store-bought neurochemicals I needed all along. I am not close to prepared to lose any of it. I am warm within my intellectual power, and you wish to tell me it is waning? You want to say I am wasting my one beautiful day worrying about the loss of a few minutes of daylight every day past the equinox, knowing that the winter solstice is the dissipation of everything I was, that I will gain no minutes after? Rubbish.

My body is increasingly imperfect. The lockdown had convinced me that my eyesight is getting worse. I do not wear my glasses often when masked and did not have cause to look far in the distance. I cannot guarantee this assessment is accurate, but things seem blurrier than they should, even with glasses on again.

A year ago, I may have broken one of my smaller toes, too small to bother with anything more than buddy wrapping. It plagued me for months. I moved wrong when biking -- though I did not notice it -- and had knee pain. I fell from my bike two autumns ago. The pink of healing remained on my shoulder for months where, it feels only years ago, it would have retreated into invisibility within a week. I do not catastrophize my injuries, but I am aware that ceasing to be ambulatory could rapidly decrease my quality of life. I healed, but I may not so readily someday. I can't know when.

Already, my 41-year-old body does things that I wish it would not, mainly in the distribution of hair and its decision to translate physical illnesses into mental ones. Embracing my body as me while it alters without my preferences is something of a big ask. It does much I do like, but I fear its retreat from the perfect health it may never have had.

One day, I hope a distant one, my body will give up, as bodies always do. I cannot know why. I cannot escape this fate and feel it on rare occasions when I look in the mirror, though my face remains youthful enough that my age is often doubted. Aside from named flaws, my body is trim and eager. It is not, all things considered, a bad body.

A girl across the unit cuts out bunny ears for a craft project.

"Hey, D, you will die," I say. She is one of our more studious residents in the college program. I expect I can goad her into the discussion with my science student.

"The sooner, the better," she answers, possibly but not definitely joking. I had forgotten my audience, girls on suicide watch at least once a month, those for whom life has not been kind. Their baseline is trauma.

"Hey, D? Stop trying to make me sad."

She gives me a thumbs up and goes back to her crafting.

I choose to imagine that I am helping my cleverer students -- specifically, my science student -- sort through Ericksonian crises early. It might simply be that he isn't used to being spoken with and listened to. He craves any extra moment that I can give him.

I am never sure how much curriculum I impart on these students. My science student is quick to remind me that I am an English teacher, impressed into teaching Earth Science by a bizarre combination of too much and not enough staff. I proudly confirm that I am an English teacher every time he brings it up, saying that this means that we can learn about the universe together, and isn't it fascinating?

last watched: The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window
reading: Guns, Germs, and Steel