There is no joy in Tucson. My friend Elisa has struck out

Today is Thanksgiving, and one of my very good friends died today.

As you may imagine, I don't have very much to be thankful for right now.

Elisa Corrales was a co-worker of mine, who would always have a smartass remark to make me laugh, exuberantly proclaiming how much she loved to see me in the morning while I was half-awake and grumpy, or sucker punching me in the shortribs on her way out the door. Our opinions about a lot of things were very similar, and she provided me with assistance when I finally applied for and got my promotion (since she had been a temp Team Manager before).

Despite her grumbling about the plethora of stupid people in this country and general dissatisfaction with the capitalist setup of our society... she was extremely optimistic and cheerful. She could always find some way to make me grin like an idiot when I was having a shitty sales day, and could give as good as she got when the team got to teasing each other. She was a good person, a moral person, an intellectual and reasonable person.

However, she was prone to having seizures from time to time, and it had gotten a bit more frequent after she began to do more of the Zumba and other workout routines in an effort to be healthier. I'm unsure if she was dialing the exercise back or not when all of this went down, but regardless, it only took one time.

She was found unconscious and not breathing, and rushed to the ICU. Unfortunately she had been found too late and was effectively brain dead due to oxygen deprivation. They're removing her from life support right now.

She's gone.

I type the words, and it doesn't feel real. I fully expect in some small portion of my consciousness to walk into work on Monday and see her at her desk, fiddling with her exercise ball and telling some moron customer that he didn't get his part shipped until now because of the holiday, stupid. I know that that's not going to be the case, but right now, I can't imagine that not happening.

Elisa is dead, and we are all poorer for it.

I can hardly even see what I'm typing. The tears just won't stop. I know that a lot of people that are praying and saying God will take care of them all have good intentions, but that and a nickel will get you a hot cup of jack squat. It makes me angry at first, but the grief overshadows that, because I know that being angry at these people is also not going to change anything.

Elisa is dead. I miss her already.

Something that Aaron Freeman wrote a while back gives me some comfort, by giving me a different viewpoint. As a rational, thinking individual, this makes me feel a little bit better. Elisa, like all of us, is functionally immortal, thanks to physics. Oh, not immortal in the religious sense, no wings and a halo in a poofy sky kingdom (that's just silly), but... becoming a part of the world, making up other things, other life, eventually being spewed back out into space as star stuff, to begin the whole cycle again... it helps to put things in perspective. Makes it less immediate, less raw.

"You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.

And at one point you'd hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.

And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.

And you'll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they'll be comforted to know your energy's still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you're just less orderly."

We are the Universe experiencing itself. For a short time, I got to experience it with Elisa. I regret that that time was short, but it was rich, and meaningful. Worthwhile.

And for that, I shall always be thankful.