Twenty One Grams:

Twenty-one grams. 

It's about the weight of the last five sugar packets in the break room. 

It’s the four nickels you put in the vending machine for a bag of chips.

It’s the three pens you bit through in exam season and the two tablespoons of butter in your grandmother’s chocolate chip recipe. 

Some say it’s the weight of one human soul. 

A century ago and a mere thirty miles away from me now, a doctor weighed the bodies of the dying before and after their last breath.

 If humans have souls, he alleged, then those souls must leave the moment our lungs deflate. The weight of our soul would be the difference in body mass before and after death.  

In one of his patients, he weighed three-quarter of an ounce, 21.3 grams, more specifically.

“I don’t think there’s anything special about humans and our souls,” someone tells me while waiting in a crowded airport for a plane back to Providence.  “We just die and it's just like an ant dying.” 

The loudspeaker rings above us, telling all the wayward travelers returning from Thanksgiving weekend to not leave their luggage unattended on the curb. There are at least a hundred people sitting idly by us on benches built to give you back problems.

The planes take off one by one, lifting above us to destinations I do not consider. Their momentum steadily increases. The carpet is a dark gray, masking the millions of footprints that have walked from TSA to the gates stretched along this hall.

There are people everywhere, but their bustle almost seems silent against the weight of our conversation.

Her grandpa died when she was young. He was a security guard, she thinks.

He died of pancreatic cancer, but smoked and drank too, so that could have been part of the problem. She digs for a second, trying to find more knowledge she does not have, but she pauses and decides it's not worth the effort.

“His death affected my mother more I think,” she says while looking me in the eye.

But she has a dog that makes her think about death more often, a labrador retriever she’s had since she was in second grade. His name is Sully. He’s golden. Dark golden–she makes sure to clarify– but he’s been whitening a lot as he’s gotten old.

 He used to play with tennis balls, bouncing along the green grass after them but his joints are weaker now. He’s not eating as much and he’s been eating less and less, so they cook beef liver for him instead of  giving him dog food. He doesn’t go on walks anymore, but he does like to sit outside in the sun and bathe in it. 

It’s almost his time, she thinks. 

Then the flight attendant calls the next boarding group through the crackle of the loudspeaker and she gets up to get in line with her pink carry-on behind her. 

“I don’t know if faith or believing in anything that happens after death would make it more easy to grieve. I don’t know, but I don’t believe in that stuff” is the last thing she says before she disappears onto the plane.

I speak to people who do –believe in that stuff that is. Two of them are Muslim students  and besides that the only thing they have in common is neither of them find much satisfaction with a limited tenure on earth.

Their heaven includes rivers of milk, wine, and honey. An eternal glow surrounding the twenty-one grams of the souls who have passed this test that is life.

There is a sense of peace in it: in immortality, in heaven, and in a god that loves you.

The next person I talk to though is someone I term a cultural Christian, which is to say that she should, according to her, go to Church on Sundays but doesn’t and maybe she occasionally bows her head and closes her eyes, but it’s more often for the final bow of a dance performance than a prayer.

“I don’t think about death often,” she admits while sitting on a couch cuddled beneath blankets and a black bonnet on top of her head.

She grew up in the south in a black church, which is synonymous with gospel and sermons that are punctuated with “Yes Lords” and calls for a “Hallelujah.” 

The girl boarding the plane to Providence believed that religious people must worry about death less. There has to be comfort in knowing or thinking you know what happens after death, but there is a reason that good christians are often described as god-fearing.

Here is an image from early Christian art:

It is Judgment Day. The archangel Michael weighs your soul on the divine scales of justice. You pray that the good outweighs the bad, that your soul weighs more than a mere twenty-one grams, more than the last five sugar packets in the break room. You pray that you have done enough.

And if you haven’t, it is fire, brimstone, and a heat so hot it melts your skin.

So I can see why this Christian doesn’t find hope in the idea of a god that would send you to hell and less peace in the idea of heaven, both of which she believes in because she was taught to.

“Reincarnation would be cool though,” she says.

Suddenly, the twenty-one grams that lived, loved, and cleaned up her roommate's twentieth birthday party would get the chance to do it all again. Do it better, even. 

“Imagine being a baby.” She chuckles to herself.

“Have you lost anyone?” I ask.

“No, I haven’t,” which explains why she doesn’t think about death all that often. 

“Maybe I’m not the best person to talk to about this,” she says, which is the first time someone has said as much to me in my conversations about death, but it is not the last.

The second time I hear it I get a sense of deja vu. I am sitting on a bench on the top floor of a study space, carefully designed to be homey. The girl I am talking to now is a friend of a friend. Said friend sits in the corner of the room clacking against her keyboard, racing against a deadline fast approaching. 

The closest thing this girl has experienced to death was an aunt who was a french singer in the nineties, lived in Spain, and killed herself at 35. A tragedy no doubt, but not one she found deeply personal. It was, if anything, more of a second-hand grief, passed down to her by her mother like a family heirloom to be shoved in the back closet.  

“I’ve experienced loss in other ways. I used to be one of those very spiritual people who believed we are reincarnated in another form, but now I think that would be kinda painful.”

Some people, I have discovered, find peace in an ending, something finite. 

The only eternity she is okay with is becoming a rigid seashell on the sandy shore of a beach, spending eternity looking out into the ocean, the waves brushing over her again and again like light traces of a pencil. An eternity where all twenty-one grams of her soul ceases to be human.

My friend looks up from her laptop.

I ask, “What’s your idea of heaven?”

“I don’t really believe in heaven,” she responds.

She’s a former neuroscience major, so she thinks that there is something that makes us conscious or accounts for the part of us beyond our consciousness and it must be a soul, but she doesn’t give any of what she says much weight. 

She thinks that part of us must go somewhere.

I imagine twenty-one grams, ascending towards an unwinding and unknowable.

But then, maybe “heaven” is simply the final gift, the final image our brain gives us as our neurons shut down and every process that ever made us who we are ceases. 

That opens a whole question of consciousness which no neurologist has figured out yet and three kids sitting on the top floor of an Ivy League building won’t either, neuroscience majors or not.

“Whatever you think will happen will happen,” my roommate says when I ask her opinion over the phone even though she doesn’t have the science background to back it. “The process of dying is probably more appalling than the death.”

She’s objectively one of the best people to talk to about this.

She’s had a near death experience or at least thinks she did. For five to ten minutes in the middle of a party, she was knocked cold with a constricting throat and a rapidly loosening grasp on the future.

“I don’t know if I died.” She says,  “Nobody there was equipped to tell me because we were all intoxicated.”

She remembers a field of grass, a tree overhead, and the sun in her eyes.

It felt like more than falling asleep though. Tangible and touchable in a way dreams usually aren’t. She could smell the grass, a woody scent reaching her nose.

I ask her what she thinks happens after death and she doesn’t know.

She thinks some version of us will return to the earth. 

Your soul may or may not have a mass, but your body definitely does. It will begin to decay the second it touches the ground. Your cells will become the bark of trees, in a way far less remarkable than reincarnation.

“There is some security in knowing this will end eventually.”

She's lost three family members in the last year, which means she knows better than anyone that grief is a lifestyle and she says as much. 

“Life is a series of connections…a very communal experience. It doesn’t mean shit if you don’t share it with anyone.”

I ask a variety of people what they want to leave behind. Plenty of them agree that they like to have helped people, to have family that loved them and they loved equally in return, so only one of their descriptions really stand out.

“Nothing,” they say while leaning over an engineering cheat sheet. “I don’t want to be remembered by a random kid in Ohio that doesn’t matter to me.”

Still, their grief is more recent and they're more reflective on death than at least half the people I have talked to up to this point. 

“Death is very tangible,” they say, “it's not a myth or an illusion.”

They only half believe in god because they wholly believe in science. The half-belief is more of a comfort thing like a thin blanket that may not be enough to keep you warm, but you huddle into anyways. 

They’d like to believe that the boy they lost, so young and full of life, is still here. They hope every milligram of his soul has found a version of peace, although they don’t believe it. They believe everything we amassed will ultimately amount to nothing.

“Why is it scary to be forgotten?” they ask me.

I reply with a quote I butcher from Jorge Luis Borges, which goes like this: “ I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited, all my ancestors.”

For a moment, we have a conversation on continuity.

They are the same age as everyone I’ve spoken to, give or take a few months, but there is a certain weariness to them. Far more damaged than the people who lost their grandparents young or haven’t really experienced someone dying at all.

It reminds me of something I was told in my first conversation with a classmate:

“It's interesting how we process loss at different times in our life.”

She had also lost a grandparent like the girl in the airport.

She went to her grandmother’s memorial service with a cross necklace hanging from her neck. It was the last thing her grandmother gave her before she died.  

She played with her cousins some days after and she realized they don't understand what that sort of loss feels like.

She remembered thinking Mimi, she called her, was the coolest. Her blouses would usually match her shoes and she got her hair done once a week– soft, fluffy, gray, white blonde hair.  And when she went swimming, she would wear a cap that matched her bathing suit. A huge latex swimming cap that she would strap onto her chin,  which people don’t do anymore.

She danced when she was younger, joyfully and without shame. 

She danced the can can with the same group of girls she had known since 16.

She was a very strong person and she loved with a certain gentleness that she passed on to her daughter.

“We make angels out of people who died, but when I think about her role in my life,  it relates to the way my mom is, and the way my mom has loved me.”

My classmate is a senior English concentrator, writing her thesis on making meaning after death and the loss of children. 

When a child dies, it’s not necessarily more sad, but it is a different type of grief. It’s mourning an if versus a when. At least that’s what the retired nurse who formerly worked in the pediatric oncologist division of Hasbro Children’s Hospital tells me. After seven years there, he felt it was no longer his burden to carry. 

He moved on to nursing education in his later years. 

During his time as a nurse, he had lost his mother, his grandfather, and several of his friends. At the point, he had seen so much death it was a normal part of life to him. An inevitability, no matter how sad it was. 

 Most of his patients' deaths were at least expected. 

“Life is random,” he said. “Bad things happen to good people, and no amount of prayer or pleading to gods will change things.”

I asked him if any of these instances stood out to him.

“The time a child I had taken care of for a long time had died at home,” he answers.

The kid’s father called him, hours later to tell him of his patient’s passing. 

“Thank you,” the grieving father said over the phone with static noise in the background. 

And they stay on the phone like that for a while, but then dial tone clicks in and they don’t speak again . 

I’m not sure we will either.

I thank him for his time either way.

Through all of this, there is still one question I am begging to have answered.

My best friend’s dad is a doctor who has seen plenty of people die by now. He works in pain management, which means he aims to make this patient's life a little bit less miserable although he may not always succeed.

 He agrees to speak with me on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. 

He calls me at ten o’clock on the dot although it is seven o’clock for him.  He is in the car and his son in the backseat. I can hear the whir of the road in the background.

I am standing stockstill. My phone battery is almost dead and I have to bend the charger I am using just right in order for it to work.

When I tell him I’m writing about death, he says “wow, dark” in a tone that can be described as bemused.

“Doctors see more deaths than a regular person,” he says, “It makes you realize that life is precious.”

I ask him the question I have been wanting to know this entire time: “what is it like to watch someone die?”

He paints me a picture.

The hospital lights are bright. The fluorescence will not be dimmed until the night comes.

The doctors probably know that is time, but the family hasn’t accepted that yet.

There are wires poking out of a pale skin, connecting this patient, someone as close as your uncle or as far away some random kid at the bus stop, to the very machine keeping them alive.

The EKG goes from 100 to 50 to 10 to 5 to…

The seconds tick by.

The heart stops pumping blood into the body. 

It would be, I believe, the moment where the twenty-one grams disembarked from this life. The moment that physician a century ago tried to capture on a well-tuned scale, but there is nothing extraordinary about his description. There is a quietness to it because although he is not speaking quite in a whisper, he is speaking rather softly with a certain sadness tinging his words.

He describes it like watching someone go to sleep, drifting off into the endless.

Suddenly, I have my answer, a chemistry exam to study for, and far more pressing concerns.

There’s a law in physical sciences: matter can not be created or destroyed. I can’t help but think if the weight of your soul is more than metaphor, if your entire consciousness has a weight as quantifiable as the four quarters clanking against each other in your pocket, science states you must somehow persist.

“Call me if you need anything else,” he says.

I don’t intend to. Death I realize is an intimate thing and no one quite has any answers that they are sure of and many of the ones I get blur together.

The line goes dead. 

“Life and death,” someone tells me on the floor of a library’s mezzanine a week before we both go home, "one continuous motion.”

I imagine a pendulum: back and forth and back again.

For now, I am on the upward swing.

Life goes on.