Energy cannot be destroyed
Stardust and Memory: Reflections on Life, Death, and Transformation
When my father was diagnosed with cancer, I found myself writing about death. Not in the way modern society often views it—as an ending, a full stop—but as the ancients did: as a transformation, a passing from one state to another. The universe itself teaches us this truth through its fundamental laws: energy cannot be created nor destroyed, only transformed. We are, quite literally, made of stardust—the same essential matter as the sun, moon, and distant stars, merely arranged in a different form.
It's strange how illness strips away our illusions. Cancer and serious sickness serve as stark reminders that we are, at our core, biological beings. When disease strikes, it shatters our carefully constructed sense of control, bringing us face-to-face with a humbling reality: there will be a last time for everything we do. A final sunrise, a final embrace, a final word spoken to those we love.
Yet those who leave us are never truly gone. They live on in our memories, in our stories, in the simple act of speaking their names. The ancient peoples understood this power of words—they saw writing as a form of magic, quite literally "spelling." By writing down a name, by speaking it aloud, we perform a kind of enchantment that keeps the essence of a person alive long after their physical form has transformed.
This understanding of writing's power shaped human history in profound ways. When Jewish merchants created their alphabet, they were inspired by what they witnessed in Egypt—the hieroglyphs that covered every arch, column, and ceiling. But they saw something else too: how this powerful magic of preservation was reserved for only the top five percent of society. Their innovation democratized this immortality through words, making it accessible to all.
The Egyptians' preservation efforts went beyond mere writing, of course. Though we associate them with elaborate tombs and mummification, most Egyptians were actually buried in the desert sand. Ironically, the heat, soil, and dryness of the land often preserved these simple burials better than the complex process of mummification. Yet there's something beautiful in their intricate burial rituals—the careful selection of fragrances, the sacred chants, the monumental architecture. All of it speaks to a deep human desire to honor our dead, to return our bodies to the earth as seeds for future life.
My grandmother's journey taught me about different kinds of transformation. She lived with Alzheimer's for over a decade, and when the end came, she was ready. Her passing felt like a natural completion, a circle closing. But my father's cancer is different. He still has so much life to live, so many moments to share with his grandchildren. When I ride the train along our usual route, I can't bear to think of doing it without him. Not yet, please—this is my prayer. Give him more time.
He remains so strong, so vibrant. Sometimes I find myself trying to negotiate with the cancer itself: Couldn't you find contentment without expansion? Your own survival would be longer if you didn't grow so aggressively. We all share the same fundamental desire—to exist, to be. Perhaps we could reach an agreement, slow down this race toward mutual destruction.
This reflection extends beyond personal illness to our collective relationship with Earth. Like cancer cells that destroy their host through unchecked growth, humans don't have to be a cancer on this planet. We can choose to live sustainably, to slow our destructive impact, understanding that this benefits everyone. The wisdom of Native American peoples teaches us to consider seven generations ahead—a perspective that might save us all.
In the end, perhaps death's greatest gift is how it teaches us to live. It reminds us that transformation is not just an ending but also a beginning, that our atoms will one day rejoin the cosmic dance from which they came. Until then, we have the power to choose how we exist in this world—whether as agents of destruction or as cultivators of life, whether we rush toward our end or learn to live in balance with all that surrounds us.
The Mother's Earth: Ancient Wisdom and a Grandmother's Legacy
I find myself wrestling with ancient truths as I face modern grief. The ancients saw burial mounds as pregnant bellies—the Earth herself swelling with new life even as she received the old. They understood something we've forgotten: death as transformation rather than ending. But knowing this truth and being ready to accept it are different things entirely. I'm not ready yet. Not for this loss, not for this transformation.
The ancients lived closer to death than we do. In Egyptian times, child mortality reached fifty percent—a number that numbs the mind when you realize each percentage point was a child, each child a universe of hope and love extinguished too soon. The horror of losing a child was—and remains—life-changing, identity-shattering. This explains the universality of the mother goddess, the protector of children, whose worship persisted well into Roman times.
Those Roman statistics tell their own story: an average age of twenty years old obscures a deeper truth. If you survived to twenty, you might well live to old age. It was reaching five that was the real challenge. Every birthday was a victory, every year a gift. Children weren't just the future—they were the caretakers of the past, responsible for maintaining family ancestral rites. Their loss rippled through both future and past.
Death wasn't an ending then. It couldn't be, not with so much loss woven into the fabric of daily life. But this understanding had to be rewritten when the mother was to be diminished, when the feminine divine needed to be pushed aside. Death became finite, terminal, a full stop rather than a comma in life's endless sentence.
Even the story of divine sacrifice changed. If a god sacrifices his son, he must be sacrificing to someone—and I suggest it was his "wife," the mother, the star in his eye, his muse and inspiration. She was the true creator of life, his co-creator, though her story has been written over, painted over, buried under centuries of revision.
I understood this more deeply when I spoke my grandmother's eulogy. Here was a woman who raised five children alone—five girls, including two sets of twins—in a world made foreign by war, alongside an abusive husband who wielded Catholicism like a weapon. Her story reads like a litany of trials: "Oh God the Father, oh he who I love and do everything for." But where was the Great Mother in her story? The Great Grandmother? This woman who knew no gentle men, whose father was stolen from her at twelve years old, who was forced into marriage by a man who blinded the family bull to make her dependent on him.
She was beaten daily, even through pregnancy, her swollen belly often the target. One child was born with a black eye, marked by violence before taking their first breath. I cannot thank a man for her strength—I thank the fierce spirit within her, the divine feminine that refused to break despite everything bent on breaking it.
Our bodies are seeds, and the Earth is her pregnant belly. We are fertilizer for the next life, borrowing this land from our children just as we borrowed it from those who came before. Even the ancient Egyptian word for burial literally translates to "return to the land"—or as I interpret it, a return to the mother. The Mother was the Earth in metaphor for so long because this truth was too obvious to ignore: life comes from her body, returns to her body, and springs forth again in endless cycles.
In my grief, in my resistance to loss, I find myself returning to these ancient understandings. Not because they make the pain less, but because they make it holy. They remind me that my resistance itself is part of an ancient pattern—the human heart fighting against transformation while the human soul recognizes its inevitability. The mother goddess understood this duality. She was both the giver of life and the receiver of death, both the pregnant belly and the burial mound, both the beginning and the end that leads to new beginnings.
Perhaps this is why losing a parent feels like losing our anchor to the past, while losing a child feels like losing our bridge to the future. Both losses remind us that we are part of something larger than ourselves—a great cycle of birth, death, and rebirth that has been spinning since the first star exploded and scattered its stardust across the cosmos, creating the very matter from which we're made.
But knowing this doesn't make me ready. Not yet. For now, I hold my grief close, understanding that like those ancient burial mounds, it too is pregnant with transformation—even if I cannot yet see what new life it might bring forth.
## Celestial Cycles and Human Loss
Death wears different faces as we age. When my grandmother passed at nearly one hundred, we could celebrate her long life—a century of memories, love, and legacy- a full circle completed. But the younger the loss, the more devastating its impact. The younger the life, the more future moments stolen, the deeper the wound.
Our connections to family write themselves into our very cells. Every parent, child, and sibling becomes our personal sun—a center of gravity around which we orbit. When we lose them, that orbital pull remains, leaving us spinning in search of a new balance. I lost my mother at seventeen, and though the wound was deep, I had a treasury of of memories to hold onto. But for those who lose parents even younger, the absence carves a different kind of scar. Those who never knew their parents often spend lifetimes searching not just for their origins, but for pieces of themselves. There is something primal in this quest: biology drives us to connect with our origins, to yearn for those who gave us life, even if we never knew them.
In this context, each sunrise becomes deeply personal yet universally shard, like the birth of our own children. The sun shines equally on us all- no one can claim it as their own, yet each of us feels its warmth as intimately as a parent’s love. Watching a plant reach for the sun in time lapse video tells us something about ourselves, we also reach for the sky.
Perhaps this is why we've always looked to the sky to make sense of loss. We fall to the ground and connect to the earth beneath our feet. In moments of extreme loss, we lose muscle control, we do not care to hold ourselves up, and we can find solace in the fresh air, the sun still rising, the earth holding us up, hugging us in an embrace.
Each sunrise becomes personal, like watching our children wake to a new day. The sun and moon belong to everyone and no one—celestial parents showing no favorites among their children. The sun shines equally on all grief, all joy, all moments of transition.
Our ancestors understood this cosmic dance intimately. Each winter solstice marked the sun's triumph over darkness, each spring the emergence of new life. This natural cycle governed their understanding of time until well after Roman times, when civil concerns imposed January's artificial new year. But the earth remembers the older rhythms—birth, death, rebirth—playing out in endless cycles above and below.
Like the sun's daily journey, loss teaches us that endings and beginnings twine together inseparably. We carry our departed within us like stars carried in daylight—invisible but present, shaping our inner landscape even when we cannot see them. Their light continues to reach us across the darkness, guiding us toward our own dawns.
The raw words
When my dad got cancer, and my grandma passed away from alzheimers, I was writing about death. I was writing about how many ancients did not see death as an end, but as a transition.
Energy cannot be created nor destroyed, only transformed.
We are made of stardust. We are literally made of the same stuff as the sun and moon and stars, just in new form.
cancer and sickness remind us we are just biological beings. a bad sickness can bring us back to the reality that we are not in control of this life. There will be a last time we do ANYTHING.
Those once with us will remain as memories… when we speak their names, when we think of them, we keep them alive.
People used to think of words as spells, writing things out is literally SPELLing, writing spells. performing enchantments by being able to read and write a name, even after that person is gone.
This is why it was so important for the jewish merchants to make an alphabet. They saw what writing of the egyptian hieroglyphs meant to them. They saw the writing on the walls, literally on every arch and column and cieling, but only the top 5% of society could have this honor.
Most egyptians were not buried in tombs. in fact, the heat and soil and dryness of the land meant even bodies buried in the sand had as much, if not better, chance of staying preserved than the long complicated process of mummification. But the whole thing is still cool- the intent, the effort, the study, to add specific smells and chants and build monuments to put our seeds, our bodies, back in the ground as fertilizer for the next lives.
My grandmother lived a beautiful life. She lived with alzheimers over 10 years, and was ready to go. My dad still has a lot of fight in him. He still has my children, his grandchildren, to be part of their lives. I cannot think of losing him. I cannot think of riding the train on the same route without him. I know that time will come, but not yet, please. This is my prayer. Give him more time. Please.
He is so strong, so vibrant. That errant cancer cell, can you not just find a way to stay content, rather than sucking a host dry? You will last longer if you dont expand too fast. We all just want to be here, let’s make a deal. Let’s try to be a bit less aggressive so we can all last longer. You do not benefit from working too fast. Let’s just slow it all down.
We do not have to be a cancer on this earth either. We can live sustainably. Humans can do good for this earth. We can choose to slow our destructive role, knowing all benefits. Let’s think seven generations down.
Death is not an end but a return to the mother earth - the earth so often connected with a woman. We are stardust becoming stardust again, seeds planted in her pregnant belly for future lives to grow.
