Why Death Is Final

Yeah, I know my subject headline today is stupid. But only on the surface. Stick with this E mail and you may see what I mean by the time it's done. I was thinking about death today, not mine...I figure I am the only immortal one. I am not planning to die, not packing clean underwear just in case I do, nothing like counting down the days as Paris Hilton would on her prison calendar as she anticipates "the end" of her jail time.
I intend to ruminate on the finality of death, how we all disappear from memory either sooner or later, but how all of us can live on silently. But I'll mention that physical afterlife at the end, just to keep you reading the rest of my E mail. Anyway, people are "buried" in many different ways. In the U.S. about 20% are cremated. The rest are put in those wooden or metal boxes (prisons for non breathing, I guess) and dumped in a spot of earth or in a mausoleum that we call a burial plot. Neither one seems appealing to me, That's why I have chosen immortality. In some areas of the world almost everyone is cremated, and in some they are simply tossed into the ground and covered with dirt.
But what happens after they are dispatched those ways? Well, maybe the first generation visits the burial plot and puts flowers or some other symbolic item on the grave to show respect and to ease their own guilt about how badly they treated the departed when he or she was alive. (If I happen to not be immortal and die, you'll be sorry for not responding immediately to my E mails...guilt will overwhelm you) But as time goes on and the next generation dies, the original mourned begins to be forgotten. The plot sits unrecognized by everyone except the caretaker who is there only to maintain the appearance of the tomb in exchange for wages, not care about who resides in it.
Even real memories of the famous among humans become lost over time. Sure, they are recorded in history, but as Henry Ford once said , "Most of history is lies, the rest prejudice". So the memories we have of the famous are tainted so badly they not real. And when the great kings built those monstrous tombs, they realized that eventually they would decay and disappear. (though I think those plastic grocery bags may also, like me, be immortal objects. I should have my name and picture printed on one just in case)
You doubt me? Ok, then tell me, not about your grand or great grandparents, but about your great great great grandmother. Oh, you don't even know her name, and have not a fathom of what she was like? See, she is gone from collective memory already. And if you dig up information on the Internet (You think the internet will also be immortal.....Hmmmmmm The only three immortals- Jim, plastic grocery bags and the Internet.) about her it will be a few facts that can never be verified. As to her personality or soul, you can never know it now. She is gone forever.
So back to my first paragraph where I intimated that there is one way that death is not final. It's a "maybe" rather than a certainty because in some people the link is very slight. I refer to genetical inheritance. When we pass on our genes to a child it is as close to immortality as possible, or maybe a delay in death. As long as humans live and a speck of our genes are passed on we have not really died. Just as the religious believe their soul lives on, we know for a fact of a kind of physical non death our when children inherit our genes and pass the on through theirs. Oh, my! This means Paris Hilton may be immortal too..............