In quite a lot of cosmogonies, the universe is created out of some kind of chaos. Chaos is typically depicted as a dark abyss or a void space. Chaos gives way for things to be made out of it or take up space within it. Chaos is also a scientific term, often used to refer to the unpredictable randomness that occurs in systems of order.
In elementary school, we were once asked to write creation stories that would explain how something in the world came to exist. I wrote a story about how dogs used to be God’s angels (because their name was “God” spelled backwards) until they became man’s best friend. God obviously became jealous of man, so he took away the ability of dogs to speak to man in the same language. This is why dogs bark.
In Hesiod’s Theogony, “Chaos gave birth to Erebos and dark Night,” thus kicking off the creation of everything else after it. In Lucretius’ The Way Things Are, everything falls straight down in a vacant space known as the void, until one particle here or there swerves, triggering a kind of creation from this random act of disorder. In Genesis, “the Earth was without form, and void” until God created light.
In my creation story from elementary school, the universe did not begin with God already present, like I had been told was the case. The universe existed by itself; a wide, empty space. Then one day God appeared randomly. “Poof!” was the word I used.
Similar to a “poof,” the Big Bang was an explosion of what would eventually become life from a hot ball of energy. The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of the universe will always be increasing, meaning the universe is in a constant slow descent towards disorder, towards the heat death from where it came. From chaos to chaos again. Void to void, ashes to ashes.
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I’ve known that I want to be cremated since I was nine. It was at this age that I became aware of my own mortality, not because someone close to me had died, but from reading Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark with my friends. I was freaked out by ghosts, but I was also freaked out about not being a ghost. What happened then? I went to Catholic school and firmly believed in a heaven, so it wasn’t some big religious question making me lie awake at night. I was just terrified, and the longer I lay there, unmoving, petrified, stiff; the more I felt like I was already dead.
In The Order of Time, Carlo Rovelli believes that our fear of death is an error of evolution. Most animals instinctively run from things that threaten their lives, “but it’s a terror that lasts an instant, not something that remains with them constantly.” We humans make the mistake of fearing death constantly.
For the whole time I knew him, my Grandpa O’Shea never feared death. He planned his entire funeral, shopping for a good priest to lead it by attending a variety of masses under the Christian umbrella, thus earning the nickname “the Roaming Catholic” by the one he eventually chose. By the time he was ninety-six years old, he hadn’t bought green bananas in years in case he died before they ripened, and he was always reading too many books at a time. The last book I remember him reading before he died was Future Babble, a book about how futile it is to predict the future.
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We talk about chaos like we know it intimately, but too often is the term chaos invoked like it wasn’t something we all came from. Whatever you believe, it is difficult to escape the necessity of spontaneity and disorder when it comes to making sense of the world. We like things to be nice and orderly, because order is good. Disorder is the opposite of order, therefore disorder is bad.
Chaos theory rejects this binary, and instead of pitting these two structures against each other, reimagines them as lovers searching for each other on a crowded dance floor, or as the lingering habits of a childhood best friend. According to Katherine Hayles in Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science, “chaos may either lead to order, […] or in yin/yang fashion it may have deep structures of order encoded within it.” Our inescapable descent into chaos may not be so unlike the point at which we started, and not so unfamiliar to us as anything else in our recognizable, orderly world.
My Grandma had a stillbirth in between my mother, the youngest of the family, and her older brother Tim. If she had had the baby, a boy named Sean, my mother would not have been born, and her sister would have tragically remained the only girl in the family. During the stillbirth, she lost a lot of blood and fell unconscious.
Grandma O’Shea woke up in a huge field. She heard noise coming from somewhere in the distance, so she made her way to a big house. As she got closer, it looked like someone was throwing a party. A lady walking by the big open door stopped and stared at her when she arrived at the doorstep. It was her late grandmother Katherine. She cocked her head to one side in confusion. “Kathleen, what are you doing here? You’re not supposed to be here yet.” The next thing she remembered before waking up was somebody yelling “She’s coming back!”
Grave bells were contraptions built in the olden days to alert the passersby of graveyards that someone had been (accidentally) buried alive. A bell above the ground, a string running down into the person’s coffin. If the bell rang, people walking by could either alert the nearest gravedigger or grab a shovel themselves. This is where the colloquialism “dead ringer” comes from. You can hear a grave bell ringing today in the Ripley’s Believe it or Not Museum in Niagara Falls. Seeing this exhibition when I was nine made me realize that my existential crisis wasn’t really about what happens after you die. I was actually scared of being buried alive, hence the solution of cremation. I can’t come back if I’m just a pile of ashes.
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If chaos is something that can lead to order or have structures of order within itself already, then it must have an inherent catalyzing characteristic that allows it to do so. Something that allows it to give birth to Erebos and dark Night, to provide the room for Lucretius’ Swerve, to offer a space for God to create the Earth and the heavens, and to explode that ball of energy, pressure, and heat. Chaos is not the opposite of order. It is simply the potential for disorder; the potential for everything to be anything more than it is right now.
Grandma O’Shea was diagnosed with cancer when my mom was in her mid-twenties. It was practically too late by the time it was discovered, and there was only a small chance that any treatment would work. My Grandma made the choice not to suffer during her last few years.
My mom found this out the night of my parents’ first real date. My dad was supposed to come over for dinner. She called my dad, and told him what she had just heard from her mother on the phone. She told him she wanted to see him, but she didn’t think she could be very much fun tonight. Less than an hour later my dad was at her door with a bottle of wine. He told her he didn’t care what they did, he just wanted to be with her and make sure she was okay.
Grandma O’Shea died from cancer on my mom’s birthday in 1996. My parents were supposed to be married later in July that year, but had shifted their date to a rainy March 2nd ceremony so that my Grandma could be there to see the wedding. As per her insistent request, when Grandma was cremated, she was burned in a dress so she would look nice for the party.
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If chaos is where we come from and it’s where we return, then death is nothing more than the potential for something else. Perhaps not life all over again, but not necessarily an abyss or thermodynamic heat death either.
I started writing poetry again after my Grandpa passed away in 2018. I couldn’t cry, although I wanted to, but I wrote a poem, and he always liked that I liked to write. I kept up writing poetry here and there. I took creative writing classes the following year, and the year after that. I consider myself a writer now in the way that he thought of me as one.
I still fear death. A lot less than I did when I was nine, though my stance on cremation remains the same. But I used to think we tended towards death like trees bowing towards the earth, struggling to stay upright until a strong enough wind topples them over. Now I think we tend towards death like the way roots grow into the ground.