A Cure for Death
Aug 3 2026
This lab is working on a cure for death
he matter-of-factly said
as we breezed by
on our tour of the institute.
All of us living forever?
Bad idea, you might say,
but on your deathbed
will likely want it anyway.
You can cure meat
leprosy
and even a broken heart,
but is “cure” the best word for death?
As if immortality was natural
and death the malady.
Because for most of the universe
the normal state of being
is insentient, inert
— dead stuff, like asteroids
and interstellar gas.
While for all living things, at least on earth
life is a fleeting blip
in an oblivion
of eternal non-existence
— the billions of years
before you were born,
the billions after you’re gone.
Which I try imagining,
as if to imagine
could make it easier.
I think of a sleep
you don’t wake up from,
a drugged and dreamless sleep
that never ends.
Or better yet
those eons that preceded me,
the utter void of nothingness
I only know there even was
because science says so.
So I accept death,
however reluctantly
however much I fear it.
When my selfness will be expunged
and my atoms returned
to the star stuff they once were;
the natural state
of inanimate matter
from which we arose.
We lucky few
who have been privileged, in our brief unlikely lives
to witness creation,
able to feel
the surprise, wonder, and awe
of the universe.
Who get to create meaning
as if there’s a reason we were born,
even if it’s nothing more
than wishful thinking
and self-importance
instead of truly why.
Not a departure, but a return.
No afterlife
no cure.
This started off as a shot in the dark. A promising line came to me — “a cure for death” — and I immediately thought of the sociological implications of everyone living forever, the possible psychological burden, and the odd choice of “cure”: as if death wasn’t natural and life was the rule.
But I expected little, because I could see it quickly turning pretentious, tendentious, and too philosophical: a topic more suited to prose, with its dense reasoning and linear exposition, than to poetry’s more allusive and idiosyncratic style.
So I’m pleased I stuck with it, and with how it turned. It expresses my materialist world view — my atheism, my tendency toward a bemused nihilism, my acceptance of my insignificance — without losing the light touch that would lose all but the most committed reader.
While in the poem I say I fear death, it’s really dying that I fear. And that’s also why I put “likely” into the line “will likely want it anyway”. Because I know people can reach a state where they welcome death, even wish for it: an escape from torture; a reprieve from pain, shortness of breath, helplessness and dependency.
I also state there’s no afterlife. (Of course, understanding that there’s no way to definitively know!) But I do understand why people console themselves with the belief. If I was capable of faith, I would as well. Unfortunately, unplugging a brain is like unplugging a computer: it doesn’t keep running, and there is no mind — let alone a soul — separate from the squishy stuff inside your skull, that does.
Between writing the first draft of this, and now tweaking it in its 3rd (4th?) iteration, I read this article (published in the Atlantic). I was struck by how Lightman calculates the astronomical odds against one’s unique existence — one hundred thousand billion to one — as well as the potential permutations of DNA — more possible combination than there are atoms in the observable universe. Our brief unlikely lives indeed! Emphasis on the unlikely.
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