About a decade before my father died, he asked me to start collecting rocks for him. I didn’t fully understand why, but since I was studying geology at the time, I began to pick them up wherever I visited. Limestone from the Alps; granite from New Zealand. He kept the rocks I collected on a window-shelf at his office.
My dad trained as an accountant, and worked for a company that made lamp-posts and poles for traffic lights. On family holidays and days out, he would point from the car’s driving seat at grey, galvanised lamp-posts at the side of the road. “Look! That’s one of ours,” he said. We all made fun of him for that. One day, he came home with a garden climbing frame made from steel poles, which he’d had made for us in the factory. It was awesome. We did not make fun.
Two particular moments stay with me about the day of his death.
The first was taking the phone call inside a lift, on the way up to my office. Two women inside the small space were laughing so loudly that it drowned out my mother’s voice, and her crying. The second moment I remember was an hour later, as I rode the train alone back to my childhood home in Manchester. It was a horrible, strange interlude. I sat on a quiet train, and thought about what I would meet on arrival: the shared sadness, the responsibility and, perhaps, the awful unvarnished reality of a body. The heart attack ended my dad’s life in his early 60s. He had only just retired, and was planning to spend his days travelling, fishing and birdwatching. But in that pause, I watched a world that had utterly failed to notice. Outside the train window, London roofs transformed into fields, but nothing else changed. All this shock, I realised, was entirely my own.
I am rational; I understand why. It would be ridiculous to expect anything different. But on that day, the world’s indifference felt stark. You can see why others turn to religion at such times, but I could not. I still struggle to reconcile the failure of the rational worldview – or my own at least – to speak to individual loss.
I found a measure of comfort recently hearing biologist Robert Sapolsky talk about a strange experience he had after the death of his father. (It was in this Radiolab episode about an essay he had written). Sapolsky described how the identities of him and his father began merging a little. At first: “I found myself arranging the utensils as he had, or humming his favorite Yiddish tune, and soon I had forsaken my own blue flannel shirts and put on his,” he writes. Then his behaviour took a troubling turn. His father had kept small bottles of nitroglycerine around the house in case of heart attack, and Sapolsky found himself doing the same, despite the fact that he was perfectly healthy. “I took one back to California and, disturbingly, found I needed to keep it with me. I would make love to my wife, work out in the gym, attend a lecture, and always the bottle would be nearby. One day I misplaced it briefly, and everything stopped for an anxious search.”
As a scientist, Sapolsky initially tried to pathologize his behaviour. “What the hell was going on? I don’t believe in gods, angels, or the transmigration of souls….my head swam with unlikely disorders from my textbooks to explain this intermingling.” But he found no diagnosis. He gave up.
Instead, Sapolsky concluded that what he was feeling was a flicker of something intrinsic to human experience: a resonance between generations and between our apparently individuated selves that is there, but often ignored. “We no longer reverence continuity,” he concludes.
If you are a rational person, you might dismiss Sapolsky’s experience. But what harm is there in the idea of such continuity? Personally, it speaks to me. I don’t mind that there is no evidence.
A year and one month after my dad’s death, I was on a mountain called Scafell Pike in the UK Lake District with my wife. The peak is the highest point in England. Far below us, a lake shimmered inside a wide bath-shaped valley cut by a huge glacier more than ten thousand years ago. Near the top of the mountain, we walked through fields of boulders. These rounded fragments, battered by the winds, are made of lavas and igneous intrusions dating to the Ordovician period – so more than 400 million years older than me. That is deep time.
So, surrounded by the sublime, I did what my dad asked. I picked up a rock, and I put it in my pocket.
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Richard Fisher is a feature editor at New Scientist. He lives in London and tweets at @rifish.
Photo credits: rock cairn – alainmarie2; resonant face – slimmer_jimmer
Richard, wow.
When my grandmother died, I kept the things that reminded me most thoroughly of her; a worn blue housecoat, an old wallet, a half-used lipstick, and the notecards and envelopes she used to write me letters. For a long time I couldn’t bring myself to take off the housecoat.
I think the pain in your question is why Alain de Botton wrote Religion for Atheists.
How very strange. I climbed Scafell Pike myself after the death of my father.
How odd continuity is. A year and a month after my father’s death I too climbed Scafell Pike and looked down on Lake Windermere.His hobby? Geology. Stones are always a reminder of our small but sometimes useful place in the scheme of things.
Thanks for this thoughtful piece.
I m not going to undervalue this article with theories on time,its clear its a personall story from a personal place,and i love it…having grown up in beirut,death is faced very early in life,and a purely science point of view,is always left lacking..
This is a beautifully written article, extremely interesting and thought provoking. Your comments about the world failing to notice your individual grief are so spot on, it reminds me of the few times in my life where I have experienced loss and grief and how the world continues despite how you feel. I had not heard of ‘deep time’ before and agree that the idea of it is both awe inspiring and bleak both at the same time. It is strange how that concept and idea can make you feel two completely opposite feelings. It is both reassuring that the world will just keep going and we are just tiny parts of it but also quite scary realising how fundamentally insignificant we are and then ultimately does it really matter. I had never heard of Sapolsky but recognise those patterns of behaviour in ways in which my parents have grieved over their parents. In ways I have held on to objects that remind me of lost friends and loved ones. It becomes healing in someways to adapt some of their behaviours and mannerisms that once belonged them. A way of connecting despite death. I remember picking up stones when I visited Auschwitz and finding something very reassuring about picking up something tangible that I could take with me that was a part of something else and of a different time. Something that may well have existed long before me and will exist long after me. Thank you for sharing this personal story.