09:33 – The memorial service for Dutch took place yesterday.

To most people’s way of thinking, Dutch is gone, except perhaps in some mystical religious sense. I don’t think of things that way, and haven’t for a very long time. I think of people as a part of a Tree of Life. Not the Tree with branches that represent mammals, birds, and so on. A human tree. I think of humans not as individual organisms, but as parts of a single organism that can be thought of as a gigantic, immortal tree. We’re all leaves and branches on that tree. New branches and leaves sprout constantly, as old ones age, wither and die. But the tree abides.

There’s nothing mystical about any of this; I’m speaking literally. Looking at the big picture, humanity is one organism, in the same way that a stand of aspens is one organism. The pieces that made up Dutch’s genome still exist, just as they existed before meiosis and homologous recombination stirred them up to create Dutch’s genome. And Dutch’s genome, like all of our genomes, is simply a minor variation on the generic Human Genome.