Twenty five. Law school graduate. Married? Not yet? My grandkids? Not yet. Somewhere in my heart his life goes on.

How I've come to look at it.

Because all religious belief, including christianity in every flavor I've encountered is, from a psychological standpoint indistinguishable from any other irrational belief (superstition, or magical thinking, for example), I've come to see it as protective, or perhaps a defense mechanism. First though, defense mechanisms get bad press. They aren't always harmful or unhealthy. We all use them to get by in life. After all, you can't spend your whole life completely focused on the full reality of human existence: it's too much. You need to be able to buffer yourself.

That said, I think one thing most religions have in common is the comforting notion that there is someone bigger than you who makes your life possible, who looks out for you to some degree, expects great things out of you. Many have the component of transcendent joy in serving this greater being. Most include an awesome fear of trespassing against it. All of these elements are far too much like a young child's relationship to a parent for me to see it as anything but an adultified version. A comforting construct: God as the Parent who will kick your enemy's ass, and give you paradise, if you're very, very good.

Next, it seems people are neurologically predisposed to find a God construct. There are areas of the brain triggered by prayer and/or meditation in fMRIs of religious folks of all walks. There's the God helmet, too, which triggers a sensation of God's presence when worn, simply by triggering the right hemisphere temporal and parietal lobes. There are other similar studies of similar phenomena. Now, I'm not saying that I think that just because your brain is wired for something, that that means the original thing is real or not-real. The brain is wired for dreams and hallucinations, which I think we can all agree have limited reality (that is, they exist, but only within our own brains). This doesn't mean that I think all these phenomena exist solely in the brain either: there's evidence that some out of body experiences are objectively real, even though you can have a fake one fairly easily, according to Michael Schermer.

When I was in the throes of unbearable grief over Jesse, my psychiatrist kept pushing me to at least try to believe in God and follow a religion, on the theory that it would make me happier, and cushion the loss. I tried to point out to her that there aren't many religions that would accept a dead atheist like my son into heaven, so what exactly would I be forcing myself to hope and pray for?

I've been a serious, deep believer. I know how seductive and convincing it all is. I guess what I want to say is that I don't think believers are stupid, or delusional, necessarily. I think we all have things we believe in with less than sparkling pure evidence. For many, the intuitive sense of Godness is all the proof they need. It's not meant to be logical. For others, that which is good about, say, the Bible, adds to their proof. Again, doesn't stand up to logical tests, but it's an understandable framework, and not stupid, just limiting.

The test is whether the belief is useful, helpful and positive, versus unhelpful, destructive or limiting in some unnecessary way. Maybe God is the ultimate woobie. But woobies and pacifiers when used properly won't kill anyone and they aren't contributory to or indicative of idiocy of themselves.

Got a guitar handy?

Usually when I make up a song I don't remember it for very long. But this one comes back to me all the time. I have to force it out of my mind if I'm in public. Today is Jesse's brother's birthday (I have to give him a nickname so he's not always in Jesse's orbit this way). As I was walking home last night I remembered the day of his birth, and how easy his was, compared to Jesse's, so easy that I started laughing in the middle of it.

I loved being their mother.




This corny song I wrote for Jesse

I hate these corny songs
That make everybody cry
So I don’t have any excuse for this one
Honey,
It’s just been so hard
since you’ve been gone--

So I try to see you near me
I try to feel you near me
I try to know you’re near me
I try to see you everywhere.

I was walking in the park
Last night and everywhere I looked
I saw a little bit of you
In every face that passed me by

I saw the children you could have had
I saw the child that you once were
I saw the father you’d have been
I saw you old, and slow and grey

And I could feel you near me
I could see you near me
I could hear you near me
And I
Saw you everywhere.

I went off the pills
And in my head I heard this song
And there’s so much I want to say
And hear from you, I’ll never hear you

But I
feel you near me
I feel you near me
And I
I see you everywhere.

I want to tell you
about your brother and your friends
They’re all doing well
And when I see them it’s a little gift
A gift from you, a bit of you.

That’s when we feel you near us
We feel you near us
And we
See you everywhere.

This last verse is hard
Too much like saying goodbye again
Feeling your heart stop
Under my hand
again.

So I'll pretend you're near me
I'll pretend I hear you
I'll pretend you're near me
And I'll see you everywhere.

Fearless

Right after Jesse was diagnosed with a relapse, I wrote a post titled Fearless. We had been through this before, we were going to beat it again. His spirits kept mine going. We were going to be fine. The leukemia was an annoyance, a returning nuisance, after the bone marrow transplant, all would be well. He'd never have to go through it again. Then later, when we realized his blood counts were worse than we thought, when the pain got worse, when the infection started, and it hit him that he might die after all, we only had a few days for him to confront the possibility of his death, to fear it, make peace with it. Ignore it, and live each minute as if it were just like any other. I prayed all the time. Every step was a prayer. Everyone I knew prayed.

Yesterday I was walking home from work, and remembered that his last moments of consciousness were a wry smile at the nurse, who had found him sitting on the john, slumped against the wall. Dying. She had asked him if he was alright and he smiled. And then he was gone. They pumped him with drugs to induce a coma. By the time I got to the hospital he was out cold on a gurney, getting prepped to go to the neurological ICU. Intubated. The MRI showed a fountain of blood in his brain, destroying everything that was Jesse. Obliterating memory, movement, thought, dream, breath. All that was left for days was his heart. It stood up to everything, until they pulled the tubes out of his lungs, and then only slowly did it give up. My hand on his chest, feeling those last beats, as precious to me, each one, as his first.

It wasn't the first time I'd been that close to death. I was there when my father died. I kept him alive till the ambulance crew arrived. I knew the color and smell of death, the taste of it, the sound of the death rattle, and lived with that for another 28 years. Longer than my life had been till then. And I had Jesse alive, with me for most of those.

Two years later, those last moments with Jesse stick to me. But then, his whole life is mine now. I'm the only person left alive who remembers it all, or most of it. Everyone else is dead, or born or came into his life later. I will carry you. Up until I lost him, I worried about both boys, about losing them, about what would happen if they lost me. It kept me up at night, fearing for their safety, praying to God to protect them, praying to my Dad to look over them and keep them safe and happy. As if my thoughts, from the moment they were conceived, somehow kept them in this world.

Now that seems so foreign. Someone else did that. Someone misguided worried about things she could not control, believed she had a way to trick life, to fool death, to beat the odds like so many do. Now I don't fear for my future, for my life. I don't expect or believe God or my dead will protect us. The only life that matters to me is my son's, now, and I have given up believing I can do much but be part of that. I can't protect him, only hope that he cares for himself. It's not for me to worry, but to trust him on his own journey, however long or brief.

I don't see my own death as such a terrible thing anymore. Either you are alive or dead. (I could never understand this until recently, and now I can't remember what it was like to see it any other way). The blessing of death is that you know no more loss. Whether part of you carries on or not your time here is done. There will be no more goodbyes. The fear in the pit of my stomach is gone. That writhing, constant weight of worry lifted. You don't have to worry about death, and worry won't stop it coming.

So, no more fear of death. Acceptance of my own at least. I realize that the world works this way: I don't resent that I will go. The world must be this way, and there are nations rising up to take my place as I leave. Who would want to change that? It's fine.

Imagine how surprised I was when someone told me there was something wrong with me for feeling this way. That therapy would fix it. Why would I want to change my peace with mortality? What is there to gain, in wanting to live longer than my time here? What good did the fear of death do me? I was angry that this person thought I should go back, give up my newfound understanding. It took days for me to realize that if I had been who I was after my father's death, I probably would have said the same thing to me. I believed that all my fear and worry somehow kept my world spinning around, kept me and my children alive, kept us in God's eye. But death and I are a little better acquainted now. Life is what's sad and terrible and necessary. Death is just the other side of that, not really a door so much as another step.

Nothing

That was the title of the second show I went to. The trip through space took a bit longer than I expected, add to that the cab ride through Manhattan and I nearly missed "Nothing"-- which was a nice after-journey.

There were several astrophysicists on stage, including John Hockenberry as moderator, Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek, cosmologist John Barrow, and physicists Paul Davies and George Ellis. Going back to the beginning, or the middle, which is where I came in, Frank was saying "before the big bang, there was no before, but there was some physics before space time. There had to be rules in order for the big bang to occur."

The moderator rummaged around for possible energy sources for the big bang, and pointed out that gravity and electromagnetism work in a vacuum. As they discussed the nature of the nothing between planets, Frank said that at some point, we'd had to stop thinking of space as nothing: we found out we'd have better laws of physics if we ascribed properties to space. He then drew the analogy between space and water. Fish physicists might not understand the properties of water until you took it away. And then they'd realize all the things it does. Imagine space as nothing, do the math, and then you realize when it doesn't work, that there has to be something there.

The moderator said, so "nothing" is an active space.

Frank then launched into a description of everything you can find in nothing. Quarks and antiquarks, condensate wiggles that produce pions. Electrons and positrons pairing up and then disappearing. Higgs condensate by the way, is what he means, and he's pretty sure it can be detected with the large hadron collider. Everyone onstage loved the large hadron collider.

Everything in the universe jitters, he told us. Higgs bosuns, pions, quark interactions. Particles and antiparticles come together briefly, then annihilate. It happens constantly [this is why the guy earned a Nobel prize btw]. The thing is, when an electron and a positron meet and annihilate, we're talking about an event that takes place in 10 to the -21 seconds, in a space that's 10 to the minus -10 cm. Hard to measure, except indirectly.

But as Paul Davies reminded us, "finding nothing is not the same as not finding anything."

He related the quantum vacuum to some of the properties of that antique concept, ether. Quantum ether, he said, is mostly frictionless, except in the case of black holes. A black hole vacates the region it occupies. That is, it scrubs a big hole in space.

In 1975 Stephen Hawking told a conference full of physicists that black holes glow; they steadily evaporate heat until they disappear. In the quantum vacuum, that space has negative energy compared to the rest of space, so energy flows into the black hole, causing it to shrink. The spin of the black hole radiates energy in a nonuniform way, creating a kind of vacuum friction.

John Barrow added that virtual pairs of particles/antiparticles on the boundary of a black hole, rather than annihilating, hang half in and half out of a black hole, so that the half that stays out is observedly real. (Which another speaker scoffed at and said, you can't localize those particles!)

Barrow responded that you can apply force to a vacuum, stop the particles from annihilating and becoming nothing, so that positive charges pop out of the vacuum: you're looking for electrons shrouded by positrons; the effect is like a pool ball wrapped in felt: you'll see less deflection of another electron. The strength of the effect is dependent on the energy in the environment.

George Ellis points out that the vacuum has both size and shape, and has properties that determine how big things are, and how time curves. The vacuum, he says, is the rule book of all the properties of space.

The moderator guides us back to the big bang. If there had to be rules for it, how were they different?

Paul Davies says, It'd be strange if the rules that operated before the big bang only operated before it. The big bang is the origin of time, space, matter and energy; if it was natural, it had to have rules; there are laws that governed it.

Moderator: So the big bang was nothing? Or a door?

Paul: it wasn't a space/time singularity, there are many other "doors."

John Barrow: It's a pure assumption that the big bang was the beginning of the universe at all. The universe may not have a beginning in time.

Paul: Even if there's no beginning, you have to explain it. It can't be turtles all the way down.

Moderator: Leibnitz' question, "why is there something, rather than nothing" is the wrong question. We should be asking, what is nothing? Why did something come about?"

Paul: Nothing is an only child.

Frank: Laws aren't adequate to extrapolate past the big bang. Space is a medium; it's not empty, which opens up new possibilities. Materials propagated through space have very different properties. "Nothing" is so unstable that something spontaneously forms.

Moderator: doesn't that contradict entropy? If the natural state moves from nothing to something?

Frank: if you thing of nothing as something that possesses energy, or carries attractive forces between particles, that moves them-- that creates energy. You put them back together, and things happen. That's not the same as reversing the second law.

John: what was once merely philosophy has entered a harder environment where you can test it and list it more exquisitely.

We don't know if vacuum energy defines precisely the relationship between density and pressure; is the universe being accelerated by this? or something almost like it?

Paul: Now we're talking about dark energy, the energy of empty space, of quantum effects. Is it speeding up or slowing down? You can't know how the universe is moving, if it's on the borderline -- only if the relationship between density and pressure is large enough, that you will go on expanding.

George: --and we don't know if it's likely to reverse or not. That's what we're looking at with the LHC and the ion collider on Long Island. [he makes an aside about people who worry about them destroying the universe with those things] You could nucleate a bubble of black hole material. If a black hole expands at the speed of light and engulfs the universe...well, you won't know it. Or you'll see it but you won't have time to realize what happened.

Frank: Nature has been doing more violent, extreme things in space than we can do here.

Then after a pause for effect, he adds: Space is filled with bond pairs, quarks and antiquarks, sigma mesons, all these interactions derive consequences you can check. Pressure changes, how particles move, oscillations, vibrations we can see as pi mesons [if you're lost, a pion and a pi meson are the same thing; he's trying to say they're not making all this stuff up, and that they're going to find all this stuff one way or another].

George: Space has size, it expands and vibrates. The vibrations are associated with the way structure is formed; expansion determines the shape of matter.


Even the audience questions were interesting. Well, not the questions so much as the answers: one dreamer asked if there were fluctuations in time, if it ever moved backwards or changed speed. Frank answered: we've done well so far by assuming that if it does happen, we can ignore it. John added that the universe is blind to the direction of time, expansion is constant, and doesn't distinguish future from past.

Another scifi reader asked if consciousness affects physics [I think she thought that had something to do with the uncertainty principle, or maybe the laws of attraction? but I can't be sure]. Frank's response?

"There's no evidence consciousness affects physics...Well, only in the sense that if your standards are low enough you can never be wrong."

The next question had to do with (gulp)external reality [I'm sure you can imagine], and the answer was this: it would be shocking if our senses, designed to give us a way of functioning in the world, had exhausted reality. They only sense a very small sample of reality. Where we see nothing, there's actually lots of stuff. Even with technology we can't see all of it, but we can see what Nature didn't expect us to see.

Observations are not recorded only on our consciousness, but on photographic plates, etc, and then we interpret that. Are we biased, distorting? Yes, there's interpretational bias, but there is a reality beyond that. Reality is impressed upon us by the existence of our own senses, by the evolution of our organs to sense it. They had to be evolving in response to something real. We have ears and eyes that evolved to adapt to an outside reality that has to exist separate of our ability to sense it.

The last question of the night was about string theory. Frank couldn't help taking a dig: string theorists are important, he said, but they "haven't made serious contact with empirical reality yet."

Oooh, Nobel slamdowns are sweet.

So, I guess the message of Nothing is this: you can't think of space as just the empty, three D background of stellar matter. It's (as Einstein would say) more like a three dimensional fabric that can twist and flex, that is affected by the mass of the objects in it, and that affects those objects in profound and measurable ways. And if you can't figure out a way to measure it, Frank will probably make fun of you.