The instrument of Grief Cosmology℠ · by Rev. Rabbi Henry-Cameron Allen, OCP, ICGC
The energy of a life is not subtracted from the universe. That is the first law of thermodynamics, and it holds whether or not anyone finds it consoling.
This instrument does one thing. It tells you how far the leading edge of that energy has traveled since someone crossed, and what it has passed on the way. It will not tell you where they are. Read on and I will show you exactly why, and what it can honestly say instead.
Nothing you type is sent anywhere or stored. The whole calculation happens on your own device, and it is gone when you close this page.
Where that energy goes is a second question, and physics answers this one too. The heat released at a crossing spreads into the air and the ground, and Earth sheds its heat to space as infrared. Some of it leaves at once. The rest leaves over months and years. However it goes, it goes outward at the speed of light, in every direction, and it does not return.
Grief Cosmology℠ calls the leading edge of that going the Luminous Horizon. Behind the edge is a filled and widening volume rather than a thin shell, and the edge moves outward by nearly six trillion miles every year. It does not stop.
With cremation the dispersal is quick. With burial it goes more slowly, through the long ordinary work of the ground, and I have come to call that the speed of life. The destination is identical. Only the pace of the leaving differs, and across years the difference is far too small to change what the lantern reads.
This is where people who want to comfort you will overreach, and I will not.
The energy spreads as it travels, so it thins. Brightness falls with the square of the distance, which means no instrument will ever pick it out again, and none ever could. And entropy takes the labels off everything, so nothing out there is stamped with a name.
So the lantern does not hand you a star and tell you they are on it. It cannot, and any tool that claims otherwise is selling you something. What it does is calculate how far the leading edge has traveled, and show you what now falls inside that radius: which of our neighbours the going has already reached, and how much of this small corner it has come to include.
What entropy takes is the universe's bookkeeping. It has never once taken the energy.
The Hermit carries a lantern, and a lantern was never built to throw light at the horizon. It lights the ground immediately around you. That is its whole design, and for a long time I thought of it as a limitation.
It is not. My son Cameron crossed eighteen years ago, at the writing of this page, so the leading edge of his going is about eighteen light years out. Our galaxy runs somewhere around a hundred thousand light years across, and its disk fades out rather than ending, so even that is approximate. Eighteen against a hundred thousand is not a departure. It is barely a step off the porch.
When I use the lantern to find where the edge of his going has reached, the edge is still well inside the circle it lights. Small and near turns out to be relative. He is still small. He is still near. And that is not something I reached for to feel better. It is a number I can check, which is the entire reason this instrument exists.
If that way of measuring is new to you, The Geometry of Hope is where I set it out in full, and Grief Cosmology℠ holds the framework underneath it.
Rev. Rabbi Henry-Cameron Allen, OCP, ICGC
TheVirtualHermit.Quest
The primary instrument of Grief Cosmology℠. It calculates how far the leading edge of the energy released at a crossing has traveled since that date, and shows which nearby star systems now fall inside that radius. It does not claim to locate anyone.
The leading edge of the energy released at a crossing, traveling outward at the speed of light. The physics is conservation: the energy of a life is not subtracted from the universe. Behind that edge is a filled and widening volume rather than a thin shell.
No, and the framework says so plainly. The energy spreads as it travels, so it thins, and entropy removes its labels. Nothing out there carries a name. What entropy takes is the universe's bookkeeping. It has never taken the energy.
Yes. With cremation the energy disperses as heat quickly. With burial it goes more slowly, through the long ordinary work of the ground, at what Grief Cosmology℠ calls the speed of life. Either way it leaves Earth as infrared and travels outward at the speed of light. Across years the difference is too small to change the reading.