Oma

My grandmother died a few months ago. It’s taken a while to get used to the concept of her absence. The fact of that patient voice now silent remains difficult to comprehend.

One of the things she always said was that everything happens for a reason. I don’t know if I believed her then and I don’t know if I believe her now. She was a deeply religious person and had a strong faith in God. Not the dull Catholic / Anglican God or the handclapping God of the Evangelicals. Rather, her view of God was of an all encompassing, wise and ultimately interventionist being.

Everything happens for a reason. Towards the end, when she had to move into a home, I sat opposite her and we talked about causality and purpose. In her patient way, she explained that there was purpose but that it wasn’t always obvious to see how the connections were made. In her mild accent, eyes still clear despite the ravages of entropy, she insisted that God had a plan and that it was not always possible for us to see that plan. She said this full in the knowledge of her own limited time, which several strokes and illnesses had made increasingly apparent.

She smiled at me and said “I know you don’t believe me now, but you will” (That sounds paraphrased and sentimental, but it’s nevertheless the way the conversation went.)

I don’t understand and I dont think I believe, yet. Perhaps one day it becomes apparent.

Right now, however, I suspect it may just be chaos, barely constrained by probability.

Maybe that’s a kind of freedom. If there is no purpose, no meaning beyond a temporary inversion of entropy, then we are free to do what we please without fear of retribution. We make our own purpose, and are also wholly responsible for the causal effects of our actions.

The challenge would be to maintain that view in the face of death.

According to Plato, Socrates faced his mortality with an exposition on the nature of the soul. Socrates posited that if nature is a circular process of constant flux and change, and the alive inevitably one day become the dead, then it follows that the dead must one day become the alive. Given this circular continuation of the alive to the dead to the alive, after death the soul must transition to a different plane, a realm of clarity where it waits before transitioning back again to the muddy complexity of the real.

This concept of circularity is comforting. The concept of purpose is comforting. What I can’t quite make myself believe is that any of it is true. I miss her calm confidence in that purpose and the reassurance that it provided, even if I didn’t believe it.

Most of all, I miss that wise voice on the other end of the crackling phone line. Regardless of any greater concepts, that voice, the complexity and beauty and extent of that voice, is gone.