The Death of a Matriarch

When i told my mother, a family physician, she responded as some one who has stood at dozens of death beds time you realized, she said, flesh decays. One response to the inevitability of the flesh decaying is a kind of nihilism. The paradoxical answer that ancient judaism gave to such despair was a promise. When we die, the only comfort we have is that we aren't conscious to learn that there was never any heaven or god to give it all meaning. Even having many biological descendants doesn't count for much beyond a single lifetime to one's grand kids.