{nothing lasts forever}

This weekend, as a preparation for seeing Star Trek Beyond, we decided to watch the last few Star Trek films. We began with the 2009 Star Trek. Inside on a sunny day, a setting inherently fertile for depression, we hit play. 

I grew up watching Star Trek each week. That quavery space theme song reminds me of the smell of dinner on Sunday evenings. It reminds me of the feeling of the weekend being over and the school week about to start. The feeling of losing something and getting something far less appealing in its place. Gloom and disappointment. I know, it was a great show. Absolutely. Just an unfortunate time-slot. So, all this to say, I was primed for overcast feelings. I just didn't realize how intense they would be. 

Spoiler here, for anyone who has not seen the film – but if you haven't it clearly isn't  important to you, as it's been years since it came out. There's a parallel universe / time travel situation which allows old Spock to meet his younger self. I can't tell you if it was just seeing Leonard Nimoy so old, or if it was something about the juxtaposition of the old and young that turned a dial in my brain, but something clicked, loudly. I became clearly aware that I was going to die. That the world would go on after I was long gone, in much the same manner as it aways had. It was not a theoretical knowing, it was different. I felt the world without me in it. And it was a profoundly strange feeling. 

There are three other experiences in my life that have ever caused me to feel similarly lonely feelings.

First, there is this scene from 1954's Gojira is one of the most crushingly sad things I have ever seen. There is something about being abandoned underwater or in outer space that is suffocatingly sad. The loneliest possible fate.

Next, a dream I once had left me with the same feeling. My father's mother and my mother's mother died months apart. I was living in New Orleans at the time.  I had gone home for my father's mother's funeral and was unable to go home for a second funeral so soon after. The day I heard the news, I called in sick to work and laid in bed. After a time, I fell asleep and dreamed a dream of rare intensity. I was underwater, in an old submarine. I went out into the water in an old suit and somehow, my tank and I got disconnected from the main ship. I floated at the bottom of the dark ocean, knowing I would soon be without air and there was no possibility of making it to the surface or finding the ship. Again the solitary, suffocating sadness, and although it seems literal is a figurative expression.  

Finally, I remember learning about Ishi, last of the Yahi tribe in college. In 1911, he came out of the wilderness in Northern California and was taken by anthropologists to UC Berkley. Ishi, a word that simply means "man,"  lived out his remaining 5 years in a San Francisco university building. He told anthropologists about the last survivors of his tribe; his uncle, mother, sister, and himself describing the events that caused him to seek the company of others. After a traumatic series of events that amounted to the decimation of the tribe. Surveyors found their camp and ransacked it. In the scuffle, he lost his uncle and sister forever. His ailing mother passed away shortly after. From about 1908, he lived alone in the wilderness before finally emerging into modern Western society on the 29th of August, 1911. Ishi quickly captured the cultural imagination of the time, a culture so riveted by tales of the capture of European settlers by "savages" they gave birth to a literary genre.  

Ishi spent his first 50 years in the California wilderness, he had no immunity to the diseases of the city. He died of Tuberculosis in 1916.

I could never tell which part of his story made my heart ache more. The fact that he had to live for years knowing there were probably no others members of his tribe left – that he was likely the last. The fact that he shared no history or traditions with anyone and not one person shared his language or remembered when he was a child. Or the simple fact that he was the last of his people to breathe and wake and feel the sun in his face in the world and after him was extinction.