Beyond Burgers

Yesterday, one of my partner’s dearest friends died suddenly, without warning. He was one of those people who had enough life force for several normal humans, and the tsunami from the tectonic shift of his death ripped through the lives of everyone he left behind. It hit me indirectly, since I’d only hung out with him a handful of times, but even then it had surprising force. 

Last night I dreamed that my father, who died a decade ago, came back to life. We were all amazed and incredibly grateful to have him with us again, but we were too afraid to ask him how he’d done it. We thought it might break the spell. We were staying in this big old house with way too many doors, and the wind kept blowing them open, and none of the locks worked. It seemed urgent, somehow, to close them as quickly as possible, and I scrambled from door to door trying to McGiver the broken locks, but my dad was unperturbed. I suppose he understood firsthand that death doesn’t need an open door--it just comes to visit wherever it pleases. 

There’s a funny short story by Terry Bisson called “They’re Made Out of Meat.” In it, a couple of intergalactic alien researchers stumble onto earth and are both amazed and aghast to find that the only sentient species in our sector is made entirely out of “meat.” When you look at it that way, it does seem kind of ridiculous. Everything that makes us human--our fears, our longings, our kindness and cruelty, our consciousness and our creative genius--we carry all of it around in these lumps of hamburger, waiting for their shelf life to expire. 

I guess that’s why I cling to a vague, unfounded belief that there must be more than this, when all is said and done. That wave we feel when someone dies--maybe it’s like the shock wave from a rocket launch. Apparently, it takes a lot of metaphysical energy to escape the gravitational pull of meat.