Aging and Death

I've been reading The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler, about Macon Leary, a travel guidebook writer who hates to travel. Macon has a wife, Sarah, who is his polar opposite; while Macon is uptight and fastidious, Sarah is messy and carefree. Their son, Ethan, was killed in a fast-food restaurant shooting. The book tells the tale of how Macon, after divorcing Sarah, finds new love in Muriel Pritchett, a dog trainer several years his junior. In particular, I found this passage at the very end captivating:


"And if dead people aged, wouldn't it be a comfort? To think of Ethan growing up in heaven - fourteen years old now instead of twelve - eased the grief a little. Oh, it was their immunity to time that made the dead so heartbreaking. (Look at the husband who dies young, the wife aging on without him; how sad to imagine the husband coming back to find her so changed.) Macon gazed out the cab window, considering the notion in his mind. He felt a kind of inner rush, a racing forward. The real adventure, he thought, is the flow of time; it's as much adventure as anyone could wish. And if he pictured Ethan still part of that flow - in some other place, however unreachable - he believed he might be able to bear it after all."


This passage was worthy of being mentioned in that it made me think of the people I've known that have passed away. (Fortunately, they number only a few.) I thought of my grandmother with whom I lived for four years, a grandfather and an uncle I hardly knew, and a great-grandmother, of whom I've never seen the face. Like the passage says, it seems that these people I knew stopped aging the moment they died. Their faces, some half-formed and others clear as day, remain frozen in time in my memory.

Then, I thought to myself, how would things be different if I knew that they continued aging somewhere, albeit somewhere unreachable, foreign? If stillborn infants could live on, cry, laugh, go through childhood, and rule the world? It would be somewhat comforting to the bereaved, I imagine.