Unlike my dear father, I have also not lived my life worried about death. Death is a simple part of life, I always thought. It’s just a threshold into another room. And I truly believe that. Dad started talking about dying when he was in his early thirties. Sure he was going to pass on before his 60th birthday, he was quite surprised when he arrived at the verge of his eighties still chugging along with nine more years to go. Mother, who never mumbled a solitary word about death or dying, must have known something the rest of us didn’t have a clue to. She is now ninety-one years old and still running the world, if not the entire universe. She does spend a lot of time in church though.

If you think I am the happy carrier of high-quality genes and have a right to expect a good twenty more years, you’re extremely wrong. My delightful parents handed down quirks of genetics that no one realized until too late. Of my mother’s six brothers five were ploughed under by massive heart attacks. My father’s father and a couple of his brothers all suffered the same heart-related deaths. Dad went through his own heart attack. Luckily, he survived it. Diabetes runs widespread on my father’s side of the family. Many of mother’s relatives, including one of her brothers, carried the heavy load of a cruel bi-polar disorder or just a plain manic-depression disease, as it was identified back in the day. A couple of my sisters battle the same disease. (Well, one of them actually fights against it while the other categorically denies having it.) And my only brother is not the happiest camper I’ve ever known, either.

For myself, I have the family diabetes (type 2), the weight problems, and the bi-polar dips, on comparatively rare occasions. Yes, I’m a veteran of intermittent suicidal thoughts. Generally, I laugh off such sappy ideas and go on with my life. At any rate, suicide is the most horrible offense we human beings can commit. There is always another way to deal with the pain. There is always support available to help us through the travail. Murder, the gracious Universe can and does forgive; self-annihilation, not so much. Early on, the new-to-the-job Christian Church branded suicide as “the work of the Devil.” Perchance the newly minted “Church Fathers” were correct, even though so many early Christian martyrs sought death in the Coliseum’s arena. It was an assured and quick passage to Heaven. Despite being aware of the early martyrs’ lack of moral values, the Church Fathers declared suicide a deplorable mortal sin.

But forgive me, I digress, as usual. What I actually want to bring up for your consideration is reality. As a matter of fact, I would like to talk about quantum mechanics and its clash with what we, the people, insist is real. What we have here is quantum reality versus everyday reality. In other words, “what the heck is reality?”

First of all, uncertainty, with which we deal day to day, minute to minute, seems to be built into the very fabric of reality. According to the quantum boys, no one is really sure about what they see, hear, or feel. Humanity is tormented by “biocentrism,” whether we know it or not. Simply put, we humans are animals still carrying the intuitions left over from our beginnings as thinking/reasoning beings. What quantum theorizing has come up with is time itself and all the forms of every single thing we see are simply tools created in our own minds. Thus, they may not exist at all. Not as we “see” them at any rate. We humans invented the concept of time in order to explain to ourselves why it is that babies are born, grow into adulthood before our very eyes and then, at the end, what the heck begets death. Time, time, we chanted in unison. It has to be time. Little did we know, the concept of time is our own obliging little homemade plot.

To quote Dr. Robert Lanza, M.D. from the December 8, 2009 edition of The Huntington Post, “You can’t see anything through the bone that surrounds your brain. Everything you see and experience right now is a whirl of information in your mind. Space and time are simply the tools for putting everything together.”

The doctor goes on to say, “Death does not exist in a timeless, spaceless world.” He then quotes Einstein. When Einstein heard that a friend somewhat younger than himself had passed away, he said, “People like us(his friend and himself) . . .know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” From this statement of Einstein’s Dr. Lanza drew the following, “Immortality doesn’t mean a perpetual existence in time without end, but rather resides outside of time altogether.”

The ancient Egyptians believed in eternity, big time! Buried everything the departed would need on his/her journey into the land of the gods. Priests mummified all that couldn’t run away from them. For the deceased’s culinary needs they salted and wrapped ribs, roasts, legs of beef, whole ducks and even oxtails for a good, hearty soup. Favorite pets were also mummified and placed ceremoniously near their masters’ sarcophagus, or sometimes, inside the coffin with the human mummy. Cats formed the largest number of pet mummies. Dogs followed far behind. A pet alligator got the funereal treatment, as did a pet baboon. The archaeologists knew the baboon was a beloved pet when they discovered that its long, dangerous canine teeth had been removed early in its life, making it a safe house pet. In their enthusiasm, the Egyptians overstuffed tombs with every animal from cows, bulls, crocodiles, donkeys, horses, elephants, ibises, gazelles, lions, lizards, monkeys, rams, raptors, scarabs and snakes. You have to admit that those old Egyptians truly appreciated nature. Death could in no way separate them from their furry friends.

My only take on this historic behavior is my hope that I don’t run into any eternal snakes when I make my journey into eternity.

And what about eternity? Is it a straight, unturning, unchanging dirt road we must trudge down forever and ever post death? The more the quantum boys look into the weirdness of quantum mechanics and physics the more they come up against “truths” that knock the stuffing out of what most of humanity has believed during most of our current stay on Earth. And I, for one, am more than happy to hear about these scientific bumps into reality. I never yearned to spend eternity singing sappy hymns and adoring some character borrowed from religion’s worst nightmares. I want to spend whatever “time” there is between lives in learning things, absorbing knowledge, the same stuff I’ve done during my sojourns on Earth so far.

I do hope my cats are waiting for me. I miss them. My first kitty was an totally black cat, as black as they come. At the age of three, I was savvy enough to name him Midnight. Midnight disappeared as soon as he reached an adequate age and my next cat, 22 years later, was entirely white. I named him Sam. The husband-person didn’t speak to me for over a week after I brought Sam home. The Husband had been raised in a virulently pet-free home. He did finally get over his snit. After that, cats came and went in our house like models on a runway. After Sam, along came Toby, Brandy, Tom (named by the husband person), Fronk, Callahan, and Georgie Girl. (I hope I didn’t forget anybody.) Georgie lived to be twenty-three years old. Ancient for a cat.

When the husband-person and I moved to Texas, we left Georgie with our youngest daughter. I am only sorry I wasn’t there when Georgie went on to “a better cat place.” Six months after we moved to Texas I finally figured out why I was going around with a broken heart, or more like a heart with a hole in it. I needed a cat. The husband didn’t. We, well, I adopted one anyway. She’s a gorgeous gray and orange tabby and she worships the husband-person.(No accounting for feline feelings.) Her official name is Queen Anne’s Lace because the roadsides were drenched in Anne’s white Lace when I brought the new kitty home. We call her Lacey, among other things.

Unlike the Egyptians I do not believe life after death will require a ton of food, pets galore and all the jewelry one can haul away. I am also a bit uncertain of the “light at the end of the tunnel” documentation from those people who have had near death experiences (NDEs). All I request of the Universe is a quiet place to read, perhaps about quantum theories, until I’m ready to return to the corporeal state.

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About the author Cate Lane: Born in Minnesota and raised a temperate progressive, I was carried off to Texas 10 years ago by the tsunami that was my husband's retirement. Texas is not Minnesota, not by a long shot. However, I hear that Minnesota isn't Minnesota anymore either.

Writing was always my first choice in life. I began writing at the age of 8, small books about pioneers heading west. Little did I know then that I would be living in the most "western" of all the states, Texas. No one told the Texans that they are simply Southerners who, like Bugs Bunny, took a wrong turn at Albuquerque and wound up here.

I am sneaking up on 70 years of age and now own a vast store of useless knowledge. Happy to share any or all of it with you all.

Email: CthlnLn@aol.com

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