It’s always sudden in the end. They are here, then they’re gone. It doesn’t matter why, because it always boils down to “gone.”

I don’t know what happens after death. No one does, despite what they may tell you. If their faith helps them sleep at night, then far be it from me to argue with them. While I am sure that I do not have any answers, I do have my own ideas.

I think I’ll be back.

I think I’ll always be born Ryan Roberts on August 22, 1978. I think I’ll always make these same basic choices. And I think I’ll always end up here telling you this story, wondering if I’ll ever be sure of anything.

I hope when I see you again, I’m kinder, no matter how we parted last.

This time is too short.

I started writing this when my friend Brian died. I thought I was working something out for myself when I started writing this, in real time, the way you do when the clock stops and grief hands you a blank page. I did not know where that journey would take me. It turns out that I was retracing a well-trodden but slightly obscure path. That’s actually comforting, strangely. If people have been arriving at this same idea for thousands of years from completely different directions, maybe it’s not just grief talking.

As far as I know, Ecclesiastes got there first: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”

Friedrich Nietzsche said that every event, joy, pain, and thought in your life recurs in the same sequence, for infinity. He did not mean this as comfort, but as a test. Could you stand to live this exact life again, forever?

The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin was a novel written by P. D. Ouspensky. He basically said that death doesn’t send you forward into someone else’s life in some future year, but snaps you back to the moment of your own birth, to live the same life again with no memory of having lived it before.

From Hinduism to Buddhism, as well as other smaller traditions, the soul survives the body and moves forward into a new one. A new life, a new name, sometimes carrying the residue of the last life forward as karma. The story is old; the idea may be older.

The longer I read, the more I kept landing on the same idea. What if we are not reborn into a new life, but this same life again? And not only the same one, the same year, the same name, the same everything. It’s not an original idea, not fully at least. After all, there’s nothing new under the sun, right? Ouspensky wrote a very similar tale. New or old, it is a stranger claim than reincarnation, and I’m aware of that.

My thoughts on the subject sit at a slightly messy intersection of physics, metaphysics, and grief. I’ll call it a theory rather than a belief, because I’m open to being talked out of it. And I certainly cannot prove it.

There are two versions of the thing we call “death.” We only talk about one, but what about the part we do not talk about, the things unspoken?

If you’ve been on this journey for very long, you’re familiar with the version with a death certificate, a body, and a funeral. We all know about it, and for a few brief moments we talk about it, until it becomes uncomfortable. There is a giant emotional scar in a family that is left behind. Everyone has to maneuver around it. It becomes the proverbial elephant in the room. That death is real, and I’ve buried enough people I love to never minimize it.

Then there’s the death no one actually talks about. Not really, not as an authority at least, because no one can. I personally and technically “died” in 1992 from a drug overdose, but I have nothing to offer on the subject either. People have come back and said, this is what that was like. But this is not proof. It may have just been a dream, and we have no way of knowing. It’s not that we only know some answers. We have no answers at all, no proof. Answers would require communication, and that does not appear to be possible.

There is an idea in quantum physics called the Many-Worlds Interpretation. The short version is this: everything that can happen does, and is happening in multiple places at the same time—”many worlds.”

This has led to the idea of quantum immortality. Quantum immortality is the idea that when you die in one reality, your consciousness carries on in another reality, one of the other “many worlds.”

These are just theories, or maybe more of a thought experiment. But they raise a real and uncomfortable question: what happens when you just get old? People age, and even stars die. At some point, there’s no older version of “you” left.

That’s usually where the thought experiment quietly gets dropped. Nobody has a theory, much less an answer, for what happens at that wall.

Nonexistence isn’t something you can experience, not really. I look at my experiences of being under general anesthesia, which is the closest analog most of us have. That, however, is not experiencing nonexistence; it’s an absence of an experience.

So what about people’s near-death experiences and what they did or did not see? I’m not going to dive too deep into that, since it could be its own paper. I will briefly talk about my own experience since I’ve already opened that door.

In 1992, I was on my way to my first drug rehab after an incident at school. No one at the time was really aware of what I was on or how much I had taken, not even me. Shortly after my mom pulled into the parking lot and we were getting out of the car, I looked at my mom and said, “I’m not going to make it.” And that was it: I was gone.

I saw my body hit the ground, and my next memory is a week later. No white lights, no loved ones that had gone on before me, nothing—just darkness.

I wasn’t gone for very long. From what I’m told, I started breathing again on my own before they got very far into trying to revive me. So maybe that’s why I didn’t see anything. Cellular death in the brain isn’t an instant switch after clinical death. I don’t know; I just know what my experience was.

So my experience, the closest I’ll ever get to an objective look, changes nothing. I think that if you take the logic of quantum immortality seriously enough and walk it all the way to the uncomfortable questions, you always end up here. And there are no answers here either, just more questions.

The evidence seems to indicate that there is no black room where you sit and experience nothingness. If consciousness is eternal, which seems to be the one thing we all agree on, there has to be an experience to anchor it. So I believe the next logical place for consciousness to land would be in a reality capable of holding it: the place it came into being. My zero coordinates: 8/22/78.

Time is not a river; it’s a map.

There has been a persuasive idea in physics and philosophy since Einstein that the past, present, and future aren’t a river you’re floating down. It’s all just there, at once, the way every city on a map is there. Whether you’re currently standing in that city or not, it’s still there, and still real. This is usually called the block universe, or eternalism. Based on this theory, my birth in 1978 isn’t a receding memory that I am getting further away from with each passing year. It’s a fixed point in time that has never stopped existing, sitting in the same spot as this sentence and everything that happens after you finish reading it. It is a fun and mind-bending idea to think that while I’m writing this in 2026, I’m also and simultaneously being born.

The Poincaré recurrence theorem says roughly: if a system has a finite number of states, and you give it enough time, it will eventually return close to a state it’s already been in. While this has been proven to be true in certain closed physical systems, whether it applies to the entire universe is a much bigger leap.

This is the part where physics hands the baton off to philosophy and starts walking away.

But if you’re willing to take the handoff, follow me and let’s see where this goes.

If configurations really do repeat given enough time or enough universe, then 1978 isn’t a moment that happened once and is gone. It’s a road stop the universe might revisit.

This brings us back to where we started. I’m not a soul moving on into a new incarnation, the way most of the world’s reincarnation traditions describe it, but the same one, returning to its own zero coordinate to run the tape again.

Every memory of the previous “life” goes with it. There’s no inner narrator carrying spoilers into round two. It all makes me wonder if Alan Watts was right about the observer but wrong about the inner voice.

I don’t know if every iteration plays out identically, or if there’s enough variation that some runs go differently. Maybe in one iteration, I got sober a year earlier. Maybe I said something kinder to somebody before it was too late.

I’d like to believe there’s room for that.

What I actually believe, underneath all of it, is this: The people I’ve lost are not really gone. They do not live in the past the way it feels like they do. They’re not gone the way “gone” usually means gone. They just live at a different stop on the block, a block that, given enough time, I’ll revisit. Everyone I’ve ever met and everyone I’ve ever loved—they are all here. The same way I’m here writing this while being born.

Gone was never an option.

And maybe that’s why it all feels so familiar. I’ve been here before, and I’ll be here again.

I can’t prove any of this. I told you that from the start. But I think I’ll always be born on August 22, 1978. I think I’ll make most of the same choices I have before because that’s who I am, who I’ll always be. And I think, if I get the chance and there’s some wiggle room, I’d like to be a little kinder, no matter how everything unfolded the last time we met for the first time.

Fare thee well, my friend, until we meet again.