Law of conservation of matter: "a fundamental principle of classical physics that matter cannot be created or destroyed in an isolated system." - The Free Dictionary.

I felt a newfound compatibility with science when I first learned this law. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed, simply rearranged. When balancing a chemical reaction, every atom on the reactant side must be mathematically accounted for as a product as well. The notion that every building, car, and road is a reorganization of atoms that had previously formed something else makes ideas like pollution and industrialization feel perversely natural to me. When we use words like “produce” or “demolish,” we really mean to say that we have united or separated a collection of particles that had previously been in a different configuration. This concept has always made sense to me abstractly; it was only recently that I recognized how the law of conversation applies to living beings.

At my conception, I was a single cell, but not created in any way; I was simply derived from the combination of two gametes. As my mother consumed food uprooted from soil, another recombination of fragments from the world, these particles nourished and became me, along with familial DNA. Every atom that constitutes my body now was a part of the universe before it was a part of me. I am no new matter - I am organic, grown directly from the Earth. No part of me was “created” in utero. My body is the result of a rearrangement of preexisting molecules, which allows my consciousness to exist. Upon this realization, my former, angst-ridden questions of “How did I get here? Where did I come from? What does it all mean?” were answered. Like with science, I suddenly felt more comfortable with the formidable issue of life and death. I was not deposited into the world. My body and consciousness came, quite literally, from the universe itself.

The idea that I will exist after death is easier to grasp than the idea that I existed before this life. While I am agnostic, neither here-nor-there on the subject of religion, I find an undebatable truth in reincarnation, proven by the law of conservation. Where will my body go if not back into the universe, the Earth, the soil, to nourish a plant that I will in turn become a part of, for example? Lewis Thomas expresses in his The Lives of a Cell that “We carry stores of DNA in our nuclei that may have come in, at one time or another, from the fusion of ancestral cells and the linking of ancestral organisms in symbiosis. Our genomes are catalogues of instructions from all kinds of sources in nature, filed for all kinds of contingencies.” I am both composed of the “fusion of ancestral cells” and will contribute to future fusions as well. It took all of the horsepower, coincidences, and chemical reactions in the universe to allow me to exist, and now that I’m here, I will inevitably affect everything else that will ever happen. Trillions of atoms that are currently contained in this body will be in various parts of other organisms and objects, no matter how microscopic. I don’t necessarily believe in metempsychosis - that I will live again as this conscience in another body - but I do have confidence that my current molecular composition will be distributed over millions of subsequent compositions following my demise.

My fear of death is mitigated by knowing, in part, what will happen to me after I die. I don’t anticipate an afterlife in which my soul persists as a refugee from Earth in Heaven while my body decays into nothing, nor do I fear a hereafter as a reprobate repenting her sins in eternal damnation. When I die, I will return to the Earth. I am organic and recycled, and I will continue to be for the remainder of time. I was not created, and accordingly, cannot be destroyed; in this sense, I will never die. However, I do not intend to con myself into accepting death because it enables my body to contribute to parts of subsequent organisms and objects. I have no option in keeping my body, or my consciousness. And though the loss of my consciousness is unsettling, I am somehow reassured by the fact that my body, which has allowed this consciousness to exist, will always continue in some form, distributed ever-wider across the universe.

As much as I admire and love the mind that my current configuration of cells allows to exist, it is very possible, if not certain, that my consciousness will not exist after my death. I do not intend to minimize the trauma of death. I wince at the thought of no longer existing in grey matter, both the physical nervous system that the phrase connotes, as well as the intangible fog of reverie above my skull that it fosters. Of course, no one can be entirely certain of what will happen after death, but I do know that my body will return to my home back in the macrocosm even if my thoughts are extinguished. I will return to the vista I wake up to every morning and the atmosphere I gaze towards every night.

I find it difficult to regard myself as anything more than a mass of atoms, a series of chemical reactions built upon one another. Perhaps this is all that I am, but this reasoning becomes flawed when I disregard the vast potential of a mass of atoms. I must respect the incredible functionality that my complex alignment of cells hosts. Some of the very same reactions that choreograph the majestic movement of celestial bodies in space orchestrate my own movement and thoughts. My atoms are the very atoms that were present in the Big Bang. Perhaps I will meet up with this consciousness again, or perhaps that is impossible, but what composes me now can never be gone. I am forever a part of this universe, this collection of molecules that conceived, birthed, and in time, will reconcile me.