UNTIL THE SUN SWALLOWS THE EARTH

Between Resurrection and the Dying Sun

29 November 2025 – Thanksgiving

Houston airport, bound for Phoenix.

Travel is a privilege, one that comes with certain jobs or simply with the restlessness that some of us carry in our blood.

I still think often of my father, who recently passed away. There is a lingering trace of him I can feel, like a low hum beneath everything else, a faint presence just out of view. I do not want to forget him, yet the question keeps returning: how much room should the dead still occupy in the ordinary days of the living?

We have invented all kinds of days to remember them. In some churches saints are venerated and prayers rise for souls who may still need them. There is All Saints' Day, the Day of the Dead, moments when the veil is said to thin and the departed can visit or finally leave. For others there is no debate at all: the ancestors are simply here, honored daily, part of the air everyone breathes.

My own ancestors are scattered across continents. We are a wandering people; no single graveyard holds us. There is no place to bring flowers for the whole tribe.

My father rests under a tree he planted himself. A plain urn, with only his name. My mother and I were the only ones there, exactly as he wished: no speeches, no crowd. We picked up his ashes and drove home in silence, unsure where on the back seat was the most respectful spot for what was left of him. My tiny eighty-year-old mom still wanted to do right by her husband, even now.

At the farm we walked side by side to the tree in the pasture. It looks out over the lands he worked his whole life. A small hole had been dug earlier so the moment could stay private. We placed him in the soil he loved, there to wait, either for the day of resurrection or for the far-off morning when the swollen, dying sun will swallow the earth and everything in it.

Does it matter if there is a God?

Does it matter if anything comes after?

I have turned those questions over until they were like smooth river stones. The terror some live with (hell, wrath, the frantic scramble to please the right deity among so many competing claimants) feels, in the end, smaller than the mystery itself.

What some of the saints finally understood is that everything resolves into mercy. We hope for things we cannot prove, and faith fills the vastness of gaps in what we do not know. But of the few things we can be sure of while we are here, the greatest is love. Love fiercely. Love without measure when it is deserved, and sometimes even when it is not, because love is rare and should not be squandered.

We laid him to rest on a cool November afternoon, and I carry him still, quietly, the way the tree now carries him in its roots. Until the sun swallows the earth.