#14: Object permanence

Norwegian winter fog.

People disappear when they die. It's weird. It's like going back to a book you've read and trying to find something you were certain to have remembered reading but it's gone like it was never written. It's like finding out that a history book you've never read had parts of it erased, only in this case, it's living history that's gone. I think it's such a universal human desire to record time, to record history, to record the stories of our past, because we very quickly run into the human limits of memory and the hardest limit of all: the finiteness of life.

As babies, we all have to get over the hump of object impermanence, the belief that things stop existing once we stop seeing them. "See, mom's not gone, she just went into the other room to get your favorite toy. She'll be right back. See? She was just gone for 10 seconds and if you learned to wait just a moment, you'd understand, you'd understand ..." Maybe we learned object permanence a little too well. I guess that's what makes it hard: believing too strongly that people still exist even if you don't see them anymore. Wanting to believe that they're not gone, they're just around the corner, in another room, with our favorite thing, and that we're just waiting for them to come back. That by waiting, we'd understand.

I think this is why the act of ceremony matters so much. It reconciles biases and disbelief, it commiserates truth. It's the period of a sentence, the division point between permanence and impermanence. It's the sign telling us to stop waiting, stop trying to understand what's beyond understanding. It's the reminder that we are next. For life, for death, and for everything in between. See, the babies got it right the first time: it's not us who have the object permanence, it's the dead. We adults have got it wrong, because we’ve been “impermanent objects” the whole time; we just tend to forget about it.