PERPUTUAL CARE IS NOT WHAT IT USED TO BE

As a child I was always puzzled by the “Perpetual Care” marble markers in cemeteries we would visit for funerals or for Memorial Day.  How could we- the living- make representations about this? This concern may have been related to one of the recurring dreams of my youth where I was hurtling through space toward a celestial object.  The faster I travelled through the dark ether, the further away the pursued object moved.

This may explain why I’ve always been interested in subjects covering unimaginable time such as astronomy, cosmology, geology, human evolution and (to a lesser extent) archaeology. Recently, I caught a program on The Science Channel where astronomers and physicists discussed how the universe would end. Basically, in a few trillion years, all of the hydrogen in all of the stars etc. will be burnt off.  At that point, all of the energy in existence will be consumed and “the lights will go out”.  ( Not with a bang, but with a whimper) At any rate, our descendants won’t be around (assuming we don’t exterminate ourselves) as they will experience certain existential demise for a range of reasons including: 1) being consumed by a nearby super nova; 2) suffocating and starving when the sun evolves into a hotter star which will make the Earth look like Venus; or  when the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy collide creating mass destruction.

Alas, because of our accumulation of scientific knowledge, perpetual care is not what it used to be.