In the picture above, my brother Richard, who passed away a few weeks after this photo was taken, my 85-year-old brother Ed, and I are pictured.

I remember that I could not bear the pyrotechnics of human existence: how life ignited for an instant, burst in the air in a myriad of color flares, then all at once vanished. Who ignited it? Who gave it such fascination and beauty, then suddenly, pitilessly, snuffed it out? “No,” I shouted, “I will not accept this, will not subscribe; I shall find some way to keep life from expiring.” ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

My 85-year-old brother was recently released from the ICU at a hospital in Missouri after having a stent placed in his heart. Evidently, he has a long rehab in front of him. Ed is as cognitively sharp as ever, but his physical health has been deteriorating over the past few years.

Ed was born in St. Louis in 1941 and, by the random shuffling of genes, is probably my closest genetic match in the world. But while similar in our biological natures, nurture could hardly have made us more different. He is a product of the 40s and 50s; I of the 60s and 70s. He went to college at a Catholic seminary; I was educated as an undergraduate by Ivy League philosophy professors at a public university. There is little we agree on.

But he was a good brother, and I have fond memories of him teaching me to pitch a baseball, blow bubble gum, and giving me 50 cents for every soccer goal I scored. (Four times in my grade school career, I scored two goals in a game, resulting in a major payday. Quarters were a lot of money in the 1960s!) He also helped us move cross-country to my first teaching job in Cleveland and surprised me by flying there for my 40th birthday.

I can’t quite imagine what it’s like to be 85 and perhaps thinking, “Well, that’s what a life is.” On the other hand, Ed may recuperate and have many good years ahead of him, while others, thinking they have oceans of time, may die tomorrow. But death should be optional, as I’ve written many times, and as it will when science defeats death.

Yes, there are many caveats to this happening—fanatics putting an end to science, asteroids destroying the planet, killer robots, AI out of control, nuclear war, environmental disaster, etc. And I admit that I think we’ll likely destroy ourselves. But if there are oceans of time for future innovation, science will defeat death.

For now, though, our time is limited. Yet I take comfort in knowing that while we will all be forgotten—a great reminder for all those who exaggerate their self-importance—we should be grateful to have been one of those who hopefully contributed to making the world just a little better. Thankful that we played our part in bringing about a future that will be better than the past. I’ll end with a quote from Richard Dawkins.

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?

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