Before Shabbat

I happened upon a very old photograph of myself, standing next to my sister Marta, aleha hashalom. I looked at her — this cute, pudgy girl in a horizontally striped blouse. Every camera she ever stood in front of loved her; she was beyond photogenic. Then there’s me: skinny, unremarkable, perhaps vaguely uneasy at getting my picture taken. My sister Joan was either not yet born or just an infant, so she’s not part of this tableau.

I assume that’s me in the photo, though I have absolutely no recollection of the moment. But is it really me? Does that anxious seven-year-old have any connection to who I am now? Does that me still exist in some form, stored away in the folds of my neocortex? Can I find that child the way I can Google any question — say, where long-term memory is stored — and get an answer?

And what about Marta, who died almost nine months ago? Is she gone? Does she still exist in some noncorporeal form? If you’d asked me forty years ago, I’d have scoffed a hubristic scoff: “Of course not! Ashes to ashes…” But now? I keep returning to the writer Meghan O’Rourke: “A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world. How can worlds like these simply cease altogether?” And if Marta does exist, what is she now — and what makes that thing identical to the little girl in the picture? Can she remember that day, while I cannot?

It’s no more or less preposterous to imagine some transcendent link to our dead than it is to accept dark energy: we infer it from the way the universe is flying apart, yet we’ve never observed it directly and still have no idea what it actually is. So I scoff at nothing — not in the realm of memory, not in the stories we tell about ourselves and one another, the stories that define us. All we have is our stories.

I look at this little boy in 1959 and wonder: do he and I really share the same body? How can that be, when nearly every atom that made up that skinny child has long since cycled out — through breath and food and waste — and been replaced many times over? And if our bodies share so little, our points of view share even less. My perspective would be as inaccessible to him as his is to me now.

Now turn it around. A year from now, the world will be full of people, and one of them will have a peculiar, singular property: that person will be you. With any luck, a year from now someone out there will be you. But what is it about that person that makes that person you?

I don’t know. In fact, there is no definitive answer. But to wonder what my essence even is — how it links the boy of sixty-some years ago to whoever I’ll be a year from now — is thrilling and frightening and wild.

Particularly reassuring is a small piece of biology. A few parts of you barely change across an entire lifetime. The lens at the center of your eye. The enamel of your teeth. The neurons of your cerebral cortex are as old as you are.

So even as we wonder who and what we are, and who we will become, something is in here, consistent and present. The very parts of you that do the seeing and the remembering are, atom for atom, among the least changed of all.