Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. But that’s not where the story is, is it? We are not Christ, our work does not extend in any way past our deaths — even if we have put something a little more immortal than us in motion, we do not tend to it in any physical way anymore. It’s one long tale to spin: our wanderings, our losings, our findings, and on, and on: you know what is involved in this thing called living. And yet, if we’re lucky, we will one day merely rate a paragraph’s worth of obituary in the local paper. When E. E. Cummings said that “life’s not a paragraph,” he wasn’t really thinking it through. All these years we cry and shout and talk and run and work and fail and jump and fall and eat and sleep: the living of it must be enough in itself, I think. We cannot count on a retrospective to sort all of it out somewhere in time, the huge majority of us; once through and there will be no more. The story of life is not in making sense of it all, but in living today in today: right now, right here, is the story. Maybe no one will ever hear it told, but it doesn’t matter, because we were there. The experience is reason enough for life to be.