The depressing edge of things we feel better knowing nothing about.

My father, after over 20 years of working for the Department of Defense, decided to attend mortuary school in his 50's and become a funeral director. I bring this up because for over two years he kept the unclaimed remains of some poor old man in a dresser drawer in his home office, alongside various random bits of paperwork, office supplies, driver disks and so on. He also kept a TV on top of that dresser.

Finally something was done with that poor man's remains just before my parents put the house on the market and moved.

1:04:20 There's the money shot

Great watch. I respect these peole immensely. The cadavers I've handled for dissection have been in good shape, no bugs or rot. There's a very instinctual response to death/decay that we all have, and its amazing that these people can get over that to do their jobs.

It surprised me that they put the bone fragments into a blender to make the cremains. I guess it makes sense, but seeing the skulls glowing in the furnace was sort of poetic, and then they put the bones in the blender and the loud noise is kind of unexpected.

Also, this needs a "bureaucracy" tag.

That was amazing. Astonishingly enough the two things I got out of this was that death is not so bad and that making your own arrangements before you go is not a bad idea.

As I was watching the remains being cremated, and later buried, I was reminded that really life is a cycle of ashes to ashes and dust to dust. The remains of people who have died hundreds of years ago fertilized the soil to grow grass, trees, and food for future generations. Nature recycles everything in time, and if you expand that time out it means that not only do human beings become recycled, but so do trees, buildings, rocks, and even entire continents where new crust comes from the oceans, to turn into mountains, which gets eroded back into the sea.

Then, you realize that planets are just recycled matter, and even stars live and die, and their remains float around and some of that becomes part of new stars which may give rise to new planets, and new life on those worlds.

Imagine the tale a single carbon atom inside your body could tell of all the bonds and molecules it was a part of, of all of the animals and plants it helped to live, of all the rocks, mountains, and streams it was a part of at some point, and even what stars and perhaps planets it came from in the past.

And in all of this, in all of the reactions of stars, and decay, energy is slowly lost due to entropy, and it has been for 13.7 billion years. Yet, there is still so much energy left in the universe that it could possibly continue for another 100 billion years or more, continually recycling and rebuilding, restructuring and reforming, star system after star system, planet after planet, and life form after life form.

That's pretty incredible.

Wow, did not expect to watch the whole thing when I started it last night. Great movie.

I need to finish that will I started 5 years ago...