11-30-10

I had watched Charles suffer, and was the one who called in the morphine. He slumped into sleep. I came back from a coffee shop, and Dad was sitting there looking shot. So I watched Charles until I couldn't see his chest move. I put myself between him and Dad, and checked three pulse points, and so we called the pronouncing nurse.

Since then I have seen my cousins, other people, and especially Dad talking to Charles, in a coffin or his little marble box, and telling him to say "hello" to other people wherever he is. Remember that I just apostasized from Christianity 2 years ago, and before that had believed in reincarnation and the Ancient Science of Soul Travel. Then before he completely collapsed, Charles had tried to challenge me on science versus religion- I abstained from the debate because of his illness and others' grief, and this abstinence cost me.

All of this led me to look intensely at my aging and my life process, looking for a raison d'etre. I got into politics and patriotism, studying the Constitution and so on, like the Bible, about one year ago, along with reading Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan. I did not fit in the Tea Party, though, for my atheism and free thinking, nor with the liberals for my insistence on the Second Amendment and resistance to political correctness.

Is anything sure? Does anything not dissolve? Back in the mid-1990's, as a Christian, when dealing with atheists, I had asked "by what means can we know the Absolute?" Now what is Absolute, when I am dissolving? Dissolution is absolute.

I decided to live for pleasure, for my own satisfaction. After God, after America, after everything dissolves, what else is there? So I became interested in Charvaka philosophy, which teaches

While life is yours, live joyously;

None can escape Death's searching eye:

When once this frame of ours they burn,

How shall it e'er again return?