Tinteán

A Meditation on Life, Death & the Cosmos

by Frank O’Shea

At the gathering at Melbourne’s Point Cook Village after his funeral, this piece was read by Frank O’Shea’s daughter Sophie and grandson James. It had been penned and presented to fellow Villagers in the month or so before his death on 9 July 2024.

Published here (in the online magazine he loved and wrote for vigorously) with the support of his daughters, Amie and Sophie.

Every day, something like 150,000 people die somewhere in the world. Each of us knows that someday we will be one of that number, so let me make this personal: I will die one day.

There are probably studies that tell me how my mind will come to its end, and I realise that either slowly or quickly, my brain cells will stop functioning and in time, will be part of an organism that is buried or burned.

But there is more. What happens to the knowledge and experience, the good and bad things, the loves and dislikes, the stories and beliefs that lived in my brain? They are, or were, a form of vigour, they were different from similar energies from the many other people who died at about the same time.

We don’t know when all of the energy we once had is finally released into the universe, perhaps at the burning or burying, but more likely much earlier. So my energy will join all those other bits of energy now out there in the universe, where they are inaccessible to others. Here, I put aside religion or heaven or those who claim they can speak to the dead.

Instead, I look briefly to physics and what the experts tell us make up that universe in which bits of the former me will wander, probably aimlessly. We are told that approximately 5% of the universe consists of the planets and stars and comets, atoms and molecules, protons and neutrons and electrons, the action of stars and black holes. There is also some 26.8% of dark matter, possibly weakly interacting matter that cannot be measured or heavier matter resulting from the Big Bang. But that leaves almost 70 per cent of the universe that is energy- scientists call it dark energy.

Now, here is my suggestion. My former self will be part of that dark energy as will the minds and personalities of the 15,000 others who died the same time I did. That almost 70 per cent of dark energy consists of the personalities – for want of a better word -who have lived and died since organisms first appeared on earth.

Frank O’Shea

Frank was a much-loved and very energetic member of the Tinteán Editorial Collective.