We jumped from smooth river rock to smooth river rock, challenging each other to move farther downstream, a series of successive jumps between gaps that slowly became wider as we regained the dexterity of our childhood, even as the risk of falling into the swiftly moving water became greater.

We giggled like children with each calculated leap from one side of a mini-chasm to another, laughed at our ability that, twenty years hind, hadn't seemingly left us just yet. We watched the distant river bend ahead, looking for shallows and deep running currents and a place to sit and fish.

"Do you know where all of these rocks came from?" I asked.

He shook his head and then leaped from one giant boulder to a nearly sheer rock wall along the shore and then back to another smooth river rock covered in moss.

"Most of the rocks in this valley and the clearing above came from the last ice age," I said.

I made the same leap he just had and managed to retain my balance on the slippery rock that threatened to buck me off like a wild horse.

"It's interesting to think," I said, "that only from death comes life."

"How so?" He said, jumping again to yet another stone.

"Well," I said, following him, "the easiest example is you and me. Every atom that we see here, every atom in our bodies, came from at least two different stars that exploded in completely different eras. They eventually created our own solar system."

He clamored down a rocky outcropping of boulders and I followed.

"We're made from the remnants of stars that existed before Earth was even a planet."

I jumped to another stone, this one about the size of a small dining room table perched precariously in the middle of the river. I glanced back to see Nathan, my brother, staring up at the sky, pondering what I'd just said.

"Does that mean that entropy in the universe doesn't really exist?" He asked.

"Oh no. Entropy always wins." I said.

"But doesn't that mean that it'll all just keep cycling over and over again?"

"Eventually, there won't be any energy to continue the cycle."

He nodded.

"You just can't get away from death in the end, can you?" He asked.

"No." I said, "But for a while, maybe a few trillion years, it's locked in a stalemate. Life wins for a very long time before it's silenced."

 

A few hours earlier, we'd been standing together in the solemn grace and quiet of a cemetery, both of us staring blankly at the wooden box that held the remains of our grandfather and the hole in the ground that would eventually cradle his remains.

In the plot directly next to his, near to the podium and the flowers, the mourners and their chairs, was the tombstone and, somewhere beneath, the remains of our mother that had died over fifteen years hence.

We didn't speak, we didn't dare shuffle or fumble or move for fear that, whatever was holding our emotions together, would dislodge and cause us to break apart in the bright morning light.

Once the service was over, the roses resting limply across the small cedar box, the groundskeeper having lowered our grandfather's ashes into the ground and covered him with dirt, the mourners began to walk toward their cars.

I kissed my hand and placed it upon the headstone of my mother, and the same for my grandfather's plot, and bid them both a ragged, half-choked out goodbye. My brother did the same.

We wept in the car.

 

Staring into the campfire that night, I watched as we burned the remnants of a tree that had grown tall, strong, green, and had eventually faded and fallen to the ground, burdened by the very light that grew it. I watched the faces of my cousins, my brother, my father, my aunt, as the golden glow of the flame danced and cast distorted shadows across their faces as we huddled against the cold in our little campsite.

I listened to them all laugh, tell stories, share ideas, thoughts, as their children ran around the periphery laughing, yelling, and playing games the same way we once did so many years ago.

I glanced over at my brother, listened as he shared a story about our grandfather with the others, who all laughed in turn, and went on to other stories of the old man we all loved so dearly. For the very first time in my life, I was finally seeing the true results of my grandfather's years of work, his painstaking toil, his firm voice and his fatherly advice: he'd raised a family.

And I realized, perhaps for the first time, that maybe life doesn't succumb to the darkness; maybe life doesn't really ever lose.

It just rests.