Heraclitus at the Crematorium
by Gene Dulaney
AUGUST 10, 2010 TAGS:
Winner's Week: The second of three winning essays from the Remember That You Will Die writing contest co-sponsored by The Rubin Museum of Art and Killing the Buddha.
I don’t know when my father began to die. Alzheimer’s disease, his illness, affects the brain slowly at first, so the first signs are easy to miss. Aging implies deterioration of body and mind. You can’t run as fast, or see as far, or remember as well. How do you know when aging turns into dying?
My dad was a vigorous man who walked or ran daily, wrote (unpublished) novels for a hobby, and worked as a medical researcher into his 70s. He could also be irritable and misanthropic, relentlessly critical of social institutions and individuals, including his family. I was his only son, and both loved and feared him.
What he and I shared, and what brought us closest, was our mutual love of nature and science. Some of my earliest memories are of walking with Dad in the woods or at the seashore; looking through his microscope as he showed me protozoa in a drop of pond water; watching meteors in the night sky. As a child, I dreamed of becoming a scientist like him; not in order to make grand discoveries or heal the sick, but to express an awe every child knows. My father and I loved nature because it is beautiful and terrible, mysterious and logical, subtle and all-powerful; because it is holy.
“God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and want.” These words were written in the 6th century B.C.E. by a Greek philosopher living in Asia Minor. Heraclitus of Ephesus was presumably not the first to experience the universe as divine, but his account is the oldest one that has come down to us in the Western tradition. It is believed that he wrote a single book, of which all that remains are some 125 fragments culled from the works of other ancient authors. From these, it is clear that Heraclitus struggled with questions that remain at the center of human concern: What is the universe? What can we know about it? How do our lives and our deaths fit within its order?
Heraclitus declared that the way to wisdom was through observation: “The things of which there can be sight, hearing, and learning,” he wrote, “these are what I especially prize.” Self-observation was also required: “It pertains to all men to know themselves.” He stressed the difficulty of searching for truth since “Seekers after gold dig up much earth and find little” and “Nature loves to hide.” Nevertheless, the reward for seekers is great because “Wisdom is one and unique; it is unwilling and yet willing to be called by the name of God.”
After Dad retired from the lab, he moved to a town in the Texas Hill Country not far from where he had grown up. When we talked by phone, he seemed mellowed—no longer filled with outrage at politicians, businessmen, and neighbors. Maybe this is a blessing that comes with age, I thought. But he had also become forgetful, never recalling the details of my new job or his grandchildren’s accomplishments. My mother confided that he was fearful of getting lost on car trips into the city. Dad seemed unconcerned, but was willing to be seen by a neurologist at the local medical school. Her immediate diagnosis — mild cognitive impairment — could suggest anything from an extreme of normal aging to early dementia. Since Dad was happy, and there was no treatment anyway, we agreed to remain optimistic.
The crisis came a year later when my father chose to have a knee replacement for arthritis. The operation was successful, but Dad had days of agitated delirium. I sat with him in the hospital, trying to ease his paranoia, answering his endlessly repeated questions, “Where am I? What’s happening? When am I going home?” When he did go home, weeks later, all of our lives were permanently changed.
Heraclitus put change at the heart of his description of the universe. His statement, “You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing on,” is so often paraphrased that it seems a truism. Heraclitus, however, saw change in a radical way. He lived in an age when philosophers searched for the “arche,” the fundamental substance of reality. For Thales, the arche was water, for Anaximenes it was air, but for Heraclitus the arche was fire, the embodiment of change. “This cosmos, which is the same for all, has not been made by any god or man, but it always has been, is, and will be — an ever-living fire, kindling itself by regular measures and going out by regular measures.” Change governs even the heavenly bodies since, “The sun is new each day.” Change is just as dominant in human life: “How from a fire that neither sinks nor sets would you escape?”
And truly, there was no hiding from my father’s illness. Once home, he refused to leave the house. He could not read; he would not look out the window. Dad didn’t know he had Alzheimer’s. He didn’t know that he had forgotten a program he had just watched, a meal he had just eaten, a recent conversation with a friend. Along with his memory went his zest for life. His days narrowed to a simple routine in which he walked from his bed to his favorite chair, watched TV, and then returned to bed in the evening.
The routine did not change, but over the months the losses continued. Dad would turn to me with a serious expression and ask “Are you my son?” He never forgot my Mom, but would become agitated if he did not see her every few minutes. Soon he needed help to stand.
Since my father required constant care, I spent more time at my parent’s home, sometimes for days in a row. Caring for a loved one with dementia is draining in every way: physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Early one morning, as I thought about the day ahead, I reached the bottom of despair. My father barely knew me, and I barely recalled the parent he had once been. I felt as though our lives together had been wiped away. If this is what change brings, I thought, then life is meaningless and love is futile.
But at that moment, a wall inside me broke down: I gave up trying to resist the way things were — and what a surprise! Only the present moment existed, in which events flowed past and left no trace. The present became an island of freedom, completeness, and healing. Like all things, this experience passed in its turn; but it taught me what I had to know to care for my father. Peace can be found anywhere, even in the midst of turmoil. How can one make sense of this?
For Heraclitus, it is wisdom “to know the intelligence by which all things are steered through all things.” Change is fundamental, but the cosmos also contains an underlying unity. He points to the connection between opposites: “It is by disease that health is pleasant; by evil that good is pleasant; by hunger, satiety; by weariness, rest.” On another level, order and pattern arise when competing forces act in harmony. “People do not understand how that which is at variance with itself agrees with itself. There is a harmony in the bending back, as is the case with the bow and the lyre.”
Heraclitus, however, also seems to say something more profound and paradoxical. If we accept a cosmic unity, then change becomes unreal. And yet change brings forth our birth, death, and everything in between. How can both be true? “The bones connected to the joints are at once a unitary whole and not a unitary whole. To be in agreement is to differ; the concordant is the discordant. From out of all the many particulars comes oneness, and out of oneness come all the many particulars.” Heraclitus was proposing a logical contradiction. His intention was to transcend the limits of unity and change, allowing him to embrace the totality of existence — and, incidentally, to honor both life and death.
Dying from Alzheimer’s disease means dying by increments. First memory is lost, then thought and judgment. Language withers, and the simplest tasks become impossible. In its final stages, Alzheimer’s causes the body itself to deteriorate, like a car left derelict in a farmer’s field. When Dad, bed-bound, contracted pneumonia, my mother and I decided not to have him treated. He died peacefully a few days later.
I knew Dad would want his final resting place to be outside in the natural world. We took his body to a crematorium next to the town cemetery, where I looked into his face one last time. The next day, Mom and I picked up the small package of ashes, all that remained of his body, and began to drive. We stopped at a park by the Pecos River where the dry plain fell away into a broad valley. Rain had just fallen, and the spring air was filled with birdsong and the smell of growing plants. We scattered his ashes among the rocks and flowers.
From a logical perspective, this was the end of my father. His body no longer existed. The flame of his intellect had gone out. “For everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.” Yet on that spring day, I also felt the world’s hidden harmony: “God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace…. But he undergoes transformations.” The universe is greater than we can imagine, and at its heart lies a paradox that links unity and change, birth and death. I can live with that.
Gene Dulaney, a physician with training in neurology and pathology, has long been interested in science, religion and philosophy. He lives with his wife and children in Vermont.
I don’t know when my father began to die. Alzheimer’s disease, his illness, affects the brain slowly at first, so the first signs are easy to miss. Aging implies deterioration of body and mind. You can’t run as fast, or see as far, or remember as well. How do you know when aging turns into dying?
My dad was a vigorous man who walked or ran daily, wrote (unpublished) novels for a hobby, and worked as a medical researcher into his 70s. He could also be irritable and misanthropic, relentlessly critical of social institutions and individuals, including his family. I was his only son, and both loved and feared him.What he and I shared, and what brought us closest, was our mutual love of nature and science. Some of my earliest memories are of walking with Dad in the woods or at the seashore; looking through his microscope as he showed me protozoa in a drop of pond water; watching meteors in the night sky. As a child, I dreamed of becoming a scientist like him; not in order to make grand discoveries or heal the sick, but to express an awe every child knows. My father and I loved nature because it is beautiful and terrible, mysterious and logical, subtle and all-powerful; because it is holy.
“God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and want.” These words were written in the 6th century B.C.E. by a Greek philosopher living in Asia Minor. Heraclitus of Ephesus was presumably not the first to experience the universe as divine, but his account is the oldest one that has come down to us in the Western tradition. It is believed that he wrote a single book, of which all that remains are some 125 fragments culled from the works of other ancient authors. From these, it is clear that Heraclitus struggled with questions that remain at the center of human concern: What is the universe? What can we know about it? How do our lives and our deaths fit within its order?
Heraclitus declared that the way to wisdom was through observation: “The things of which there can be sight, hearing, and learning,” he wrote, “these are what I especially prize.” Self-observation was also required: “It pertains to all men to know themselves.” He stressed the difficulty of searching for truth since “Seekers after gold dig up much earth and find little” and “Nature loves to hide.” Nevertheless, the reward for seekers is great because “Wisdom is one and unique; it is unwilling and yet willing to be called by the name of God.”
After Dad retired from the lab, he moved to a town in the Texas Hill Country not far from where he had grown up. When we talked by phone, he seemed mellowed—no longer filled with outrage at politicians, businessmen, and neighbors. Maybe this is a blessing that comes with age, I thought. But he had also become forgetful, never recalling the details of my new job or his grandchildren’s accomplishments. My mother confided that he was fearful of getting lost on car trips into the city. Dad seemed unconcerned, but was willing to be seen by a neurologist at the local medical school. Her immediate diagnosis — mild cognitive impairment — could suggest anything from an extreme of normal aging to early dementia. Since Dad was happy, and there was no treatment anyway, we agreed to remain optimistic.
The crisis came a year later when my father chose to have a knee replacement for arthritis. The operation was successful, but Dad had days of agitated delirium. I sat with him in the hospital, trying to ease his paranoia, answering his endlessly repeated questions, “Where am I? What’s happening? When am I going home?” When he did go home, weeks later, all of our lives were permanently changed.
Heraclitus put change at the heart of his description of the universe. His statement, “You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing on,” is so often paraphrased that it seems a truism. Heraclitus, however, saw change in a radical way. He lived in an age when philosophers searched for the “arche,” the fundamental substance of reality. For Thales, the arche was water, for Anaximenes it was air, but for Heraclitus the arche was fire, the embodiment of change. “This cosmos, which is the same for all, has not been made by any god or man, but it always has been, is, and will be — an ever-living fire, kindling itself by regular measures and going out by regular measures.” Change governs even the heavenly bodies since, “The sun is new each day.” Change is just as dominant in human life: “How from a fire that neither sinks nor sets would you escape?”
And truly, there was no hiding from my father’s illness. Once home, he refused to leave the house. He could not read; he would not look out the window. Dad didn’t know he had Alzheimer’s. He didn’t know that he had forgotten a program he had just watched, a meal he had just eaten, a recent conversation with a friend. Along with his memory went his zest for life. His days narrowed to a simple routine in which he walked from his bed to his favorite chair, watched TV, and then returned to bed in the evening.The routine did not change, but over the months the losses continued. Dad would turn to me with a serious expression and ask “Are you my son?” He never forgot my Mom, but would become agitated if he did not see her every few minutes. Soon he needed help to stand.
Since my father required constant care, I spent more time at my parent’s home, sometimes for days in a row. Caring for a loved one with dementia is draining in every way: physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Early one morning, as I thought about the day ahead, I reached the bottom of despair. My father barely knew me, and I barely recalled the parent he had once been. I felt as though our lives together had been wiped away. If this is what change brings, I thought, then life is meaningless and love is futile.
But at that moment, a wall inside me broke down: I gave up trying to resist the way things were — and what a surprise! Only the present moment existed, in which events flowed past and left no trace. The present became an island of freedom, completeness, and healing. Like all things, this experience passed in its turn; but it taught me what I had to know to care for my father. Peace can be found anywhere, even in the midst of turmoil. How can one make sense of this?
For Heraclitus, it is wisdom “to know the intelligence by which all things are steered through all things.” Change is fundamental, but the cosmos also contains an underlying unity. He points to the connection between opposites: “It is by disease that health is pleasant; by evil that good is pleasant; by hunger, satiety; by weariness, rest.” On another level, order and pattern arise when competing forces act in harmony. “People do not understand how that which is at variance with itself agrees with itself. There is a harmony in the bending back, as is the case with the bow and the lyre.”
Heraclitus, however, also seems to say something more profound and paradoxical. If we accept a cosmic unity, then change becomes unreal. And yet change brings forth our birth, death, and everything in between. How can both be true? “The bones connected to the joints are at once a unitary whole and not a unitary whole. To be in agreement is to differ; the concordant is the discordant. From out of all the many particulars comes oneness, and out of oneness come all the many particulars.” Heraclitus was proposing a logical contradiction. His intention was to transcend the limits of unity and change, allowing him to embrace the totality of existence — and, incidentally, to honor both life and death.
Dying from Alzheimer’s disease means dying by increments. First memory is lost, then thought and judgment. Language withers, and the simplest tasks become impossible. In its final stages, Alzheimer’s causes the body itself to deteriorate, like a car left derelict in a farmer’s field. When Dad, bed-bound, contracted pneumonia, my mother and I decided not to have him treated. He died peacefully a few days later.
I knew Dad would want his final resting place to be outside in the natural world. We took his body to a crematorium next to the town cemetery, where I looked into his face one last time. The next day, Mom and I picked up the small package of ashes, all that remained of his body, and began to drive. We stopped at a park by the Pecos River where the dry plain fell away into a broad valley. Rain had just fallen, and the spring air was filled with birdsong and the smell of growing plants. We scattered his ashes among the rocks and flowers.From a logical perspective, this was the end of my father. His body no longer existed. The flame of his intellect had gone out. “For everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.” Yet on that spring day, I also felt the world’s hidden harmony: “God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace…. But he undergoes transformations.” The universe is greater than we can imagine, and at its heart lies a paradox that links unity and change, birth and death. I can live with that.
Gene Dulaney, a physician with training in neurology and pathology, has long been interested in science, religion and philosophy. He lives with his wife and children in Vermont.
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Anonymous wrote on August 10, 2010 5:39am
nice work [Report Comment]
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