It's strange that my Flickr search of "tiny tattoos" from earlier randomly came up with this one. "So it goes" is what my friend Jeff had engraved on his headstone. I was thinking about him today because my mother brought by a wedding album she put together from Shutterfly as an early 2nd anniversary gift. The album of course had several photos of Jeff. I want to feel happy when I see photos of him, but it still just sends pangs throughout my body and reminds me that we're also approaching the 2nd year "anniversary" of his death. "So it goes" is from a Slaughterhouse-Five passage that he liked:
"The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes."
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