Today is the first anniversary of my dad’s death. Yesterday I came home from the crematorium “with me dad took’d under me arm,” to badly paraphrase the children’s song about Ann Boleyn. Death doesn’t frighten me in an abstract way. I grew up with Tom Lehrer music, Charles Addams cartoons, Hitchcock short story books, and other foils to the timid mortal. This package of charred and calcined particles I carry in the crook of my arm is merely a transient monument to the man in whom they once dwelled.

Although my father died a year ago, his ashes just now returned from the medical school circuit. He was first and foremost an educator, and this seems a fitting final use for his corporeal remains. It was also was his expressed wish.

“Ashes to ashes” is a lame phrase to someone whose head was usually far beyond the clouds. I grew up perfectly aware that my body was made up of ashes from the remains of a supernova, as is the rest of our solar system. The even my cell nuclei are literally composed of decayed nuclear waste!

Not all of the mass of these coarse ashes was actually part of his body during his life. Cremation binds oxygen to any atom that will have it, increasing the total mass from the proteins being torn apart and vaporized by the process. Sort of like how 6 lbs (a gallon) of gasoline produces 30 lbs of greenhouse C0₂

It doesn’t bother me that some of the mass of the ash wasn’t him. Atoms come and go from almost every part of your body for as long as you live. They’ve recently found that even some proteins in nerves are busily exchanging ions while maintaining their balanced chemical and molecular properties. I single out nerve cells because it was once thought that grown nerves remain unchanged until you die. Most other cell types are continuously being renewed or replaced. Odds are that if you can read this, the only molecules now in you that were there when you were born are in your nerves. Also a few minority organs like the technically-dead, transparent cells in your eyes.

On that note, statistically speaking the box of ashes (that the paper trail proclaims are indeed the remains of my father’s body) has atoms in it that were once part of pretty much any historical figure you’d care to name.

• Hitler? Maybe, they were both breathing in Berlin at the same time, with my father’s house downwind from downtown. But that was a very narrow window of opportunity for once-in-Hitler atoms to disperse and migrate to my father. Then a much longer time for him to shed those and gain others. By now, Hitler atoms have spread around the world.
• Julius Caesar? Much more likely because it went farther back in time, so Caesar’s volatile atoms are certainly spread all over the world.
• Moses? I’m about as sure of the corporeal reality of Moses as I am of Gilgamesh. Let’s compromise on the much more completely documented Pharaoh Thutmose III, who lived a couple of centuries before the biblical Moses. My dad-box probably contains a bit of him.

Work out the statistics of the effusion and migration of oxygen and hydrogen (water) from any selected once-living body to yourself, if you doubt my conclusions.

Meanwhile, I started out musing that I had this armload of stardust that had once housed my father, whose career was spent studying one particular family of extra-terrestrial particles: Cosmic Rays.

His faith? He was a devout atheist. He’d studied the Torah and Talmud in Hebrew as a boy. He survived the Nazi shoah. Later he took shrapnel from an truck bomb, then lost his left shoulder to a sniper as he fought the British side by side with Arabs for the independence of his country. He came to America, found a bride (who’d worn the green-skirt uniform in Berlin as a girl), and raised a family in the Midwest. Somewhere in there he studied 3 different versions of the new testament in German, English, and parts in Aramaic. Between his life experiences, his observations of various churches, and his naturalistic training, he concluded not just that God is irrelevant, but the he must not exist.

His Nasa work frequently took him away from home, especially when he was a flight director. But he always came home with cool stuff, like detonated gyroscope rotors or shiny plastic cocktail swords! He wasn’t good at gift shopping, but could find wonder in practically anything.

He taught me to see the world through a big lens: Lots of learning. But I discuss this “lens” elsewhere on this site in posts such as My limited vision. and The Universe is not Specified to Human Scale.

It wasn’t so much that he sat down with me to teach, but rather that he kept leaving interesting things lying around. Like:

• Magazines like Scientific American, Nature, and Physics Today.
• Stacks of computer cards that I first used to draw animations, and then worked out how to read the code by comparing the holes to the characters at the top.
• Digital circuit schematics from which I learned simple Boolean logic and binary arithmetic

So, finally to bring this to a close. My family is not quite sure what to do with the ashes. Perhaps bury part in a small ceremony near the spot where he had his accident in the park. Perhaps sprinkle some into Bull Shoals Lake, where he spent many a happy summer vacations. Maybe I’ll do something sculptural in titanium and bronze around a small vial of the stuff. I think that would have amused him, if it doesn’t horrify the other relatives. Perhaps take some to Berlin and some to Israel. We aren’t rich or silly enough to want to send some into space, an actual option!