Furnace

When my grandfather died, he was cremated. I watched his heavy body being laid on bamboo slats and rolled into an electric furnace. The door of the furnace had opened just so, taken him in and then slowly sealed shut. Then the gas was cranked up and the furnace went to work breaking down my grandfather into oh so much carbon and calcium.

Some people call death a release. Indeed it is. at least some of the atoms that made up my grandfather had been there for seventy nine years. Now they would be free to go wherever.

I went back a few days after that to retrieve some of his bones and ashes. They were strange. They had been through an inferno and survived. True they weren't sentient in any way but some part of my grandfather had retained integrity after all that thermal blasting! That was extraordinary. To me it was.

I honestly don't know what to make of all this. I loved him. To know that all of what made him him was erased so quickly gets to me somewhat. There is no DNA left.  Nothing that could ever bring that person back in any conceivable way. And even if there was,  all the experiential things which were locked into neural networks in that now gone brain is truly lost. G DIVAKARAN NAIR is dead.