Someone has asked me to say a few words, and I keep getting distracted by the fact that the body in the front of the room is still, right now, obeying every law I know.
The carbon in it was assembled in the cores of dead stars, forged under pressures I cannot make in any lab on Earth, flung out across light-years, and then, for roughly eighty years, held in one improbable arrangement against the constant pull toward disorder. That arrangement is what we came to see.
It is ending. The second law of thermodynamics is not cruel; it is simply the most reliable thing in the universe, and it is winning here, as it always does, molecule by molecule.
But nothing is leaving. This is the part I wish everyone understood as they weep. Not one atom is being lost. Conservation of mass-energy is absolute: every gram that walked into this room decades ago is still precisely accounted for, redistributing, entering soil and air and the roots of things, rejoining the same slow chemistry that built it. The person is not becoming nothing. The person is becoming available.
The flowers on the casket are running the reverse of decay right now, pulling carbon out of the air with captured sunlight. Some of that carbon was, until recently, breath.
I look at the grieving faces and I want to tell them the arithmetic, which is the only comfort I actually trust: the specific pattern is gone and will not return, that is true, entropy does not run backward. But the material is four and a half billion years old and has never once been destroyed.
It was here before the person, it will outlast the grief, and it has already begun, quietly, to be something else.