This time, Grandma has gone back to her hometown, back to Jiangyan that she held so dear in her heart, and been laid to rest in this good place she had chosen while she was still alive. Rest well here. No more worries, ever again — forever happy and complete.
Jiangyan is changing. Houses will be torn down and rebuilt, and it will never be as it first was. But Grandma can stay here forever, watching the city grow. And she can soar freely among the stars and the cosmos.
It’s been two years, and I still miss Grandma so much that my body falls ill and I can’t hold it back.
On the scale of the universe, civilizations are utterly unremarkable things, and yet something still gets preserved. A mark left in spacetime.
Just like Great-grandma — even though we will never see each other again, she has already left a mark in the universe. It’s only that some way to read it back out will come later. Every one of us is the same: a single stroke on the scroll of spacetime.
As humans, our consciousness can only perceive the passage from past to future; we cannot go back to the past. But that is only a limitation of consciousness — to the universe, consciousness counts for nothing, and the physical trajectory of a life through spacetime is already branded there, in an infinitely large universe. There are always infinitely many light cones from which one could observe living an entire life with Great-grandma all over again.
Beyond the light cone, Great-grandma will yet arrive; the universe remembers everything, forever.