The Years of a Life

Recently, while walking through a cemetery, I came across the gravestone pictured below. 

Initially, I only glanced at it and walked past, but I turned around after attempting to reconcile Anne’s motherhood with her young age. Upon further inspection, I realized that Anne had been fifty-seven when she passed, not five, and that her motherhood was no mystery. At the same time, I considered the fact that Anne had also once been five, and five year old Anne is equally no longer with us. 

This line of thinking reminded me of a passage from the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh’s book The Art of Living:

In our Buddhist Peace Delegation office in Paris in the 1970s there was an English woman who volunteered to help us in our work. Although she was over seventy years old, she was in very good health, and every morning she would climb up the five flights of stairs to our office. She was Anglican and had a very strong faith. She firmly believed that after she died she would go to heaven, where she would be reunited with her very kind and handsome husband, who had died when he was thirty-three. 

One day I asked her, “After you die and go to heaven and meet your husband again, will he be thirty-three or seventy or eighty? And how old will you be? It would be strange for you, over seventy, to meet him at thirty-three.” 

Sometimes our faith is very simple. She was confused, because she had never asked herself that question. She had just assumed that they would meet again. With the insight of interbeing—the insight that we inter-are with one another and with all life—we don’t need to wait to meet our beloved ones again in heaven. They are still right here with us.

Throughout our lives, we’re many different ages, and even many different people to those around us. Anne was a fifty-seven year old mother to her children, a five year old daughter to her parents, and a wide array of other personas in between. There’s a thread of consistency in the people we are across contexts and times, which is strengthened by grouping all under the category of “I”, and that thread is the extent of our continuity. 

Day to day these changes are mostly imperceptible, but over time they accumulate, particularly during the formative years of our lives. A few months ago I ran into one of my teachers from elementary school, and while we had plenty to talk about, I realized over the course of the discussion that the student she knew has essentially ceased to exist. I have no memory of what it was like for me to be that student, nor do I share any but the most deeply rooted characteristics.

By the age of fifty-seven, Anne likely also had little memory of what it was like to be five. She had grown up, married, and had children, with day to day changes accumulating all the while. As five year old Anne faded into nonexistence, no one mourned for her – it was only with the more immediate death of fifty-seven year old Anne that an end was recognized.

A life offers the chance to exist in a multitude of ways, each temporary. One way of looking at things might suggest recognition of each transition as a sort of death; perhaps five year old Anne ought to have been mourned for in the same way her fifty-seven year old self later would be. However, I think there’s a more compelling view to take of our impermanence. The constant change can inform a different view of the self, where “I” constitutes the patterns that persist across the countless snapshots of life. Like the Ship of Theseus, our parts are continually replaced, but certain underlying structures remain through the churn. From this perspective, the structures need not even be limited to our physical selves; as we interact with others we can exchange pieces of who we are. Though Anne Jordan the physical person passed away long ago, the patterns that made her her may well still be flourishing.