Eternity

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

My dad had several subjects - entire classes - he could just teach at the drop of a proverbial hat. One such class he called "Critical Thinking." He taught students in this course to examine some typical scenarios and concepts more deeply than they might otherwise be asked to do. Eternity, he taught, along with infinity, are concepts that are beyond the ability of the human brain to truly understand.

He would ask his students to hold up one hand and imagine that they were grasping the end of a string. The students were then to envision this string as it went from their fingertips, out the window and then on for infinity. Picture in their minds, they were asked, the entirety of this string. The futility of this exercise shows that while the brain can acknowledge the existence of infinity, it cannot truly comprehend it.

The same is true for eternity. As the mind travels backward or forward in time events are preceded and succeeded by other events but there is no way to grasp the totality of time, only periods of it. Consider that, as the instructor, he was quite a bit older than anyone else in the room and presumably would die many years before any of the students. But no matter how many years he or anyone would die before anyone else, everyone in the room would spend the same amount of time being dead - eternity.

At 10:14 pm on December 28, 2009 Roy E. Tipton became eternal. Forty-one years, one day, five hours and thirteen minutes. That was the amount of time I shared on Earth with my dad. That time has shaped and will continue to shape the rest of my living years - I suspect in some ways I haven't even considered. The last 84 days of that time have been spent making sure that he would be able to pass from this life in a dignified manner of his choosing in as much comfort as possible. We never suspected it would take this long or that the journey would lead us to some of the places it did. But, as I learned in another course of study with my father, a good plan is one that does not have to be adhered to with absolute rigidity to be a success. So, while not all events in this time were anticipated or even desired, we have stayed devoted to those things that made him comfortable in the life he had remaining. His passing was as peaceful as any of us could imagine and we were at his side until the very end. Mission accomplished.