“People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” - Albert Einstein

Human denialism and our refusal to accept reality -- especially when it comes to ailments, the dying process, death and loss -- is a tale as old as time. It becomes especially salient when we have to face our own grief and mortality. Therefore, it is not surprising that a company like Calico in the United States is attempting to “solve death” through technological applications.

It sounds like science fiction but truly, Calico’s endeavors merely reflect our collective anxiety and fear about death and grief. Memory becomes the most delicate feature of our grieving experience, as it encapsulates our relationships with our loved ones, who have died or are currently dying.

Blake Crouch’s novel Recursion (2019) seeks to respond to contemporary society’s obsession with immortality, driven by our inability to cope with our grief by using science to manipulate time and memory so we do not have to deal with the pain of grief and loss. In the novel, the main character Helena Smith also builds a device to help human beings get rid of death, albeit in a different company than Calico.

Smith’s mother suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. She agrees to join the company to preserve her mother’s memory. A despondent physicist and neuroscientist, she is willing to do anything to reverse her mother’s condition, including using the company’s inbuilt time machine.

The machine will later be used by an NYPD cop Barry Sutton, who lost his daughter in a car accident. He decides to get into the machine to investigate a suspicious suicide case. Yet, inside the machine, he is instead tortured by memories of the night his daughter died.

I could relate to the characters’ plights. Losing my father four years ago hit me hard. The fact that I could no longer see the man I had lived with for my entire life was devastating.

Up to this day, I still cannot look at my father’s photographs. There are times when I still feel alienated, time stops and I am trapped in the memories of my father. I want to scream and blame the world for taking my father too soon. But as I try to move on, I realize that the more time you spend with someone, the deeper the love you feel toward them, the more painful you feel when they are gone.

Owing to my own personal experience with grief and loss, Recursion gave me an exciting yet heart-wrenching reading experience. Crouch has turned the complex explanation of the device into dialogue between the characters, not just boring descriptions and monologues, along with the controversy over reviving people’s painful memories and attempts to change our past to prevent untimely death or prolong someone’s life.

After struggling with these conundrums, Sutton is finally able to come to terms with his own loss and grief.

“I don’t want to look back anymore. I’m ready to accept that my existence will sometimes contain pain. No more trying to escape, either through nostalgia or a memory chair. [...] . Life with a cheat code isn’t life. Our existence isn’t something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain. That’s what it is to be human—the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.”

Maybe some of us still struggling with the inevitable pain of loss and grief can learn a thing or two from the characters’ attempts at closure. You can maybe shed a tear as you relate to scenes in the book depicting the most difficult struggle against memory, loss and grief.

Furthermore, the book also teaches us that science and technology cannot solve death or grief: attempts to do so, including those conducted by Calico, simply reflect a different form of denial of the inescapable nature of life on Earth, including the fact that life and death, illness and wellness are actually bound together. This is a consequence of the radical interdependence among our ecosystem elements.

If one organism could live forever, that would surely throw the entire environment off. Alternately, when one organism dies, it releases all the nutrients and chemicals it has always carried when it was still alive back to nourish the Earth. That the dead actually give life to living creatures through the completion of this cycle reflects the ultimate irony but also awesome cycle of life.

Therefore, some things in this world, such as the mystery of life and death, are far beyond our power and knowledge, such as time and memory. It is a hard, constant reminder that we are not God who can take control of everything.

After all, we are supposed to optimize our power and knowledge to nurture and support nature’s system, not to defy it, let alone destroying the system. As I have argued already, birth and death are a cycle, a part of the world we live in, no matter how hard we try to manipulate or outsmart it. Instead, the best way is to embrace the truth and make peace with it. (Ogi/Mut)

Tannia Margaret runs a microbusiness in Jakarta. She loves reading and writing. She has been a member of the Baca Rasa Dengar Book Club since August 2019.

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