Within a few hours of hearing the news, I was sitting by a creek, watching the waters churn past boulders. The dog played by the water’s edge, pawing away at rocks too deep to retrieve, and I was left with nothing to write but this.

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man,” wrote the philosopher Heraclitus. Given his interest in the impermanence of things, it’s fitting the ancient Greek is known today only from fragments of his writings.

As Heraclitus knew, you can learn a few things from wave-watching. In 1957, oceanographers found evidence that waves reaching Guadalupe Island, off the west coast of Mexico, had originated in storms 9,000 miles away in the Indian Ocean. Even the 30-metre “rogue waves” capable of turning over passenger ships eventually lose their fearsome appearance and attenuate into mere ripples, travelling for months across the ocean’s green-grey surface.

Energy can never be destroyed, only transformed. Breakers crashing against the shore don’t die outright; they transform most of their energy into acoustic energy, which we hear as crackling surf and feel as a rumble in the ground.

Just before I got the news, I was halfway through an intriguing little book, The Wave Watcher’s Companion, by the marvellously monikered Gavin Pretor-Pinney. He reminds readers that waves travel through water molecules, which are jostled about but are left behind as the energy moves on.

The human body is comparable to a wave, he writes: “Apparently, once you reach old age, your body can contain none of the molecules it did when you were a newborn. As you grow by incorporating what you consume, every ingredient of your infant body can eventually be replaced: all the particular oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen atoms, and the other elements that were your nascent body, will have been replaced. You might say that we borrow the air, water and food we consume in the very way that an ocean wave borrows the water it passes through.”

Our sense of solidity is illusory. From a distant perspective a human body is like a wave travelling across through years of groceries and beverages. And on closer inspection the human body-mind is the sum of periodic rhythms, from the heart’s beat to the brain’s electromagnetic cycles. These biological waves are embedded in cultural waves: the nine-to-five work world, the raising of family, the “business cycle,” and the rise and fall of civilizations. Our life and the lives of others come down to the same thing—“disturbances propagating through a medium.” Waves, from stormy to tranquil.

“How can we see ourselves as waves?” a wise musician friend wrote a few months back. “Parts of our bodies replace faster than others—Fourier analysis shows that any wave contains waves of smaller frequencies, so your hair follows a high overtone and your bones are close to the fundamental. As we age, we waves move more slowly through less volume of material, so like a struck drum skin, our frequency and amplitude decrease over time.”

And the news I received? Well, here’s some back-story: Bette Olson was always self-effacing and high-spirited. Putting friends and family at ease was more important to her than her own comfort. “I have always lived according to the Golden Rule,” she wrote her granddaughter. For some people that would be a lofty moral sentiment, but she actively lived it during her 81 years. She was very good at collecting people whom she loved, and loved her in turn.

Over the past two years, I watched as dementia robbed her of one skill and memory after another. After the storm—the half year when she still had self-insight—she set sail for calmer waters, punctuated by smiles and the odd moments of recognition. But by the end, there was very little of her left. So when I heard the news, I actually felt relief. Mom had left the shipwreck at last.

I remember her now with outstretched arms and a radiant smile, not staring blankly ahead in a care centre bed. And I can’t help but wonder, what distant shore did she light upon, beyond the ripples of compassion she sent out? My intuition tells me there are no deaths, just destinations. But that does not spare my heart from the knowledge that the smiling face of Bette Olson is gone from this world.

Goodbye, Mom.

www.geoffolson.com