Terre Australe Inconnue et Morte

10 Feb 2020

Brian died in his room.

We don't know why or how.

Terre Australe Inconnue.  Morte Inconnue.

I think he was about 40, but I don't know for sure.  I don't know much about him actally, beyond a few things, a few brief exchanges in passing.

He was one of our techs, fixing the aviation and weather systems.
He built a laser for a science project when he was 12.
He got bullied by skinheads in school for being a Jew.
He was very smart, and would tell you so nearly every time you met him.

It was of course a surprise when he died.  It shook a lot of people up, even those who really did not spend much time with him.  Chas came in the room and woke me in the middle of my sleep to tell me before he shambled out again in a daze.  He said he couldn't sleep that night.  Jeff said that he felt that dorm 206 should be bulldozed down first as the station renovates, because he could not think of the building as anything but death haunted.

I prayed for Brian.  I prayed for his family, for his co-workers, and for those who knew him.

At his memorial service, a eulogy was given.  It explained how Brian was a talented and exceptional tech... a man of reason who did not believe in a higher power nor would ask for prayers on his behalf.  It was stated that what he would have wanted was to be remembered for that.

I prayed again for him anyway.

There was a somber quiet that afternoon, with lots of hugging and some tears.  There was a celebration of life planned for him at Southern.

I didn't feel particularly somber.  I didn't know him.  If he had turned his back on a "higher power", then it seemed to me that the truth was something that the living had no interest in hearing, nor did it seem to me good to dwell on that, but to pray for the living, and to pray for the good that will come of perfect mercy and perfect justice for all who will stand at the feet of God in the end, to their shame or to their glory.

What I feel is for the living, to whom I'm still the odd one out in so many ways.  I can tell people that I neither welcome nor fear death... that the deaths of others have not been devastating to me for years.  Can I make people understand why?  Can I make people understand that the depth of my convictions is not measured by my sentiment?  Would they understand if I told them that I am sure Heaven is peopled by some whom we did not like, and Hell by some that we did, and that what we feel or think matters less than how we measure up to God?

How can I ask what it matters what he would have wanted if he was a materialist "man of reason"?  Dead flesh wants nothing and thus the wants of the deceased are in Hobbsian fashion non-existent... irrelevant... unreasonable fictions.

If on the other hand, he was an everlasting eternal soul, then I can and should pray for him even as I trust in God's goodness... even as I pray for those he left behind him who still are measured through their mortal lives.

Of course you don't say such things when people have raw wounds at the ends of the earth.  But I can pray in silence for the Lost.

Terre Australe Inconnue et Morte... it is beautiful and it is harsh.