I WONDERED HOW TO cover this with you. It’s about another significant childhood event centered on the death of a loved one. I don’t mean to over-emphasize the impact of death in my life, as I like to think that living and conscious awareness defines me, not death.

For me, death was simply a fact from early on, a harsh, instant, and usually unanticipated reminder that life is finite. This may continue to be true for you, though I assume lifespans are greatly extended by the day’s technologies.

Speaking of which, we are in the early 2020s and on the cusp of finding a cure for aging, a time when nearly all of humanity considers aging as a resolute fact of life and not a disease.

I don’t. Aging is a disease indeed, and it is relative among living things. Aging should not limit us. For us at this time, however, it is involuntary.

Now in my sixties, I’m doing things in an attempt to slow its inevitable advance. Running. Eating well. Eating less, including intermittent fasting. And yes, I just began taking the few substances that researchers are finding the body creates to force it into a ‘repair’ state.

These researchers have thus far uncovered that the body has roughly two states of existence with regard to its internal systems messaging. It’s either in a growth state or a repair state.

In growth, the body focuses internal energies on growing, on strength, or even weight gain. Growth is a consumption-based activity. Conversely in repair, it focuses on repairing. The body assumes it has encountered some stressors when in repair mode. It releases various substances to improve endurance and resistance to infection, remedying cellular and subcellular damage, and generally cleaning up and fixing injuries in anticipation of presumed additional stresses to follow.

These are the early findings. As a result, I have begun taking a few substances that the body produces naturally to activate this repair system. Setting aside personal hopes and aspirations from the equation, I estimate we are a decade from discovering treatments that substantially suspend aging, or at least allow humans to derive another decade or two of fruitful life. In two or three decades, given all the genetic and age engineering tech in progress, we may also have treatments that reverse aging as well.

Utterly unaware of the looming effect of this new science, humanity is far from prepared for the impacts of such technology. The implications are so extensive, I can hardly keep from writing a book solely on the topic. Anti-aging, reverse aging, age enhancements – whatever the term, this is just one of the many new advancements likely to unravel the fragile state of human societies in the early decades of this century.

To be certain, dramatically slowing or stopping aging sounds like a great deal. We might all soon live to whatever age we want, or maybe even shift gears and put the human aging vehicle in reverse.

But what of existing disparities in wealth? What of wealthy people who could easily envision the possibility of creating an eternal heaven on Earth for themselves?

Wouldn’t they do anything, and I mean anything, to gather all the necessary resources to live their lives of opulence and satiation perennially? Would they not batten-down the hatches in their massive compounds or island havens and protect themselves for centuries from the otherwise seething torrent of human disharmony beyond their compound walls?

Similarly, wouldn’t the more fortunate among us get the best, most superior anti-aging tech, enabling them to live for eons, while others make do with minor gains, if that? Greed. Fear. Envy. Hubris. Entitlement. Pleasure. Indeed, long, repetitive experiences of constant pleasure. These corrupting human traits will become even more exaggerated as we approach the epically disruptive epoch of anti-aging.

It will happen soon, and we are sorely unprepared.

Speaking of anti-aging, I indicated previously that my father died of a heart attack at forty, and my mother died at forty-eight from a stroke. Next, I will recall my brother’s very truncated life. This historical accounting is also about belief systems and how they can be so wrong, though sprinkled with some elements of truth, which leaves non-discerning minds easily confused.

Nothing is ever totally right or totally wrong, but that doesn’t make all things equivalent. A spectrum exists, and everything on the spectrum is not equal. You must free your mind from thinking dogmatically simply because someone said you must, and always be on watch for those who want to usurp your self-directed energies by feeding you rancid kibble at their table of dogma.

Whether it is of a religious, philosophical, political, or emotional nature, capitulating to any dogma is a convenient way to suspend your self-aware efforts and lazily allow others to think in your stead. When you willfully give-in to others, the fabricators of the dogma you have so easily ingested will then control you. You will have relinquished your sense of self to another human who is indubitably less competent and more corrupting than you are to manage your own self.

This rambling lead-in is a primer to Colton, my older brother by two years, and his untimely demise. With darker skin tone from my Spanish-blooded father, as well as his larger size and fearless personality, Colt was everything I wanted to be. Great at all sports. A leader among peers. Outward and aggressive.

In a way, his non-contemplative approach to living had great purity. He was simply who he was. Naturally. He didn’t have to think about himself. His alpha-dog birthplace and inherited genetic tendencies might have led him down his path, which, he often claimed, would result in fame as a professional baseball pitcher. And possible that might have been, except for one tough weekend.

My father raised us in an oddball faith that didn’t seem oddball to me in the least – at the time. I was ‘Christian Science,’ as if that was a state of being. My friends in town were mostly Catholic. When you’re raised in something, when your family appears together in church every Sunday, singing the same hymns and listening to the same preacher, even oddball seems very normal.

In retrospect, it was anything but normal.

The basic construct drilled into my juvenile mind by this belief system was this: if you have enough faith, you can do anything. That meant anything. You can heal the sick, just like the stories of Jesus. You can raise the dead, again like Jesus. You can even move mountains, which I’m not sure Jesus ever did, at least literally.

In fact, one of my favorite trinkets in those days was a thin gold necklace with an odd-looking, golden metal cube at the end, no larger than my little fingernail. A small, yellow seed was encased inside, beneath a clear plastic cover. The backside of the golden cube had the tiniest embossing: ‘If you have faith as a mustard seed, you can move mountains.’

This is a well-known Jesus saying for many Christians. But hey, I was a kid, and I took it on its face. Indeed, the dogma indoctrinated into me every Sunday by adults was entirely consistent with this saying. I just needed to have enough faith, and I could literally move a mountain.

I recall holding that tiny cube in my small palm for what seemed to be hours, staring at the embossed words, then gazing up to the mountain peaks that loomed before me.

“C’mon, Greg,” I’d encourage myself, “you can do this. What will my friends at school say when I move that peak a few miles to the right? Nobody will ever hassle me again about my small stature or freckles, or the fact that I embarrass easily and blush, particularly with the girls.”

That I could tell, the mountain never moved. I was disappointed in that little locket but even more disappointed in me.

I recall telling an adult at church about my failed attempts. He suggested I did not have enough faith to make it move, that I only needed to purify my thoughts, remove all doubts, and the mountain would move. I now assume he meant that figuratively, but I had no reference for figurative suggestions at the time.

My life then was practical and pragmatic. Climb the ponderosa pine, branch breaks, hard fall, broken bones and blood. Step through the barbed wire fence, it snags and tears my pants, bloody leg. Paint the fence with siblings and end up in an argument, covered with paint and in trouble with parents.

But not all adventures ended up in blood or trouble. Just some.

Colt and I were at church one Sunday after Dad had recently died. He was the Christian Science follower. His mother, a Spanish Californian, was born in the 1880’s and raised ardent Catholic. Somewhere along the way, she converted to a new dogma when my father was a child, and he was provided no choice but to adopt the same narrative. A general skeptic on that faith, my mother dutifully continued to take us to church on Sundays after he died, but she refused to attend herself.

Take the kids. Pick up the kids. Tolerate their complaints about going. Tell them to pipe down. She did it for consistency’s sake, thinking we needed some of that.

At the end of that day’s predictably repetitive service, Noah, a twenty-something regular churchgoer, stopped by as Colt and I were getting ready to leave. He was dark-haired, strongly built, and a youthful, firm adherent to the dogma.

“Hey, I’ve got a fun activity for you guys. Interested?”

Colt, ever adventurous, answered, “Sure. What’re you thinking?”

“I’ve already spoken with your mom about this, and she’s fine.”

I was silent, as little brothers often are in the presence of older brothers.

“What kind of fun activity? Is there food?” Colt inquired, chomping at the bit.

Noah laughed. “Sure, we’ll have food. How about we go hiking down the Grand Canyon? Have you guys ever done that?”

We looked at each other wide-eyed. We had spent many nights around the area with our family, most often fishing at Lee’s Ferry, miles northeast of the actual canyon where the river was accessible by car. Having viewed the monument only from the top, we imagined this might be one of life’s great adventures.

The day finally arrived, and we were thrilled to get started. Noah showed up before sunrise on that July morning with two other boys we didn’t know. They weren’t from our church but were our ages; ten and twelve.

We hopped in Noah’s old pickup and rambled down the old road to the Canyon. The two older guys got dibs and sat in the cab, while the younger boy and I were forced to ride in the back. Without proper seats, we bounced and jostled around at every small ripple in the ancient, reddish asphalt, trying to find some comfort on the hard steel bed.

Eventually, we unfolded our sleeping bags to provide nominal cushioning and warmth. Granted, it may have been July in Arizona, but we were seven thousand feet in elevation, and it was freezing cold in the windy pickup bed.

Just north of the mountains, the terrain changed drastically. On the south side were pine and deciduous forests. A few miles north, however, the consistent greenery suddenly turned into high desert, stunning in its brown and rust beauty. The mountains looked much more imposing from this side, given the drop in elevation and a dearth of foothills or trees to mask their height. After a few miles, the truck pulled off the side of the road.

“Guys,” Noah yelled as he opened his door, “hop out of the bed.”

The sun was just coming up, and I was glad we could stop. After twenty minutes of bouncing in the back of a pickup, the battering wind had finally spirited away all my body warmth.

“Why are we stopping, Colt?” I asked my brother.

He was wearing his blue Cubs hat that he never seemed to take off. “I guess he wants to pray over at that little spot or something,” he smirked, pointing to a small roadside stop.

Nobody else was there but us, and no traffic was visible for miles on the old two-lane.

“Whatever,” I said, bothered we’d be mixing God and requisite reiteration of scriptures with such a fun activity as hiking the Canyon.

We stayed there too long. It might have been ten minutes or thirty, I don’t recall. But piety seems to absorb some people more than others. I never thought too much that God wanted me to spend a great deal of time praying versus living, or necessarily any significant time at the former activity.

I had always believed in God, much before I ever knew anything about Christian Science or Christianity or Jesus. That belief was finely threaded in the fiber of my being as far back as my memory could go. But there was too much pomp and circumstance and ritual about this religion that drove me nuts. For me at that time and even yet today, God has two aspects. God exists. God creates. That’s all. Match, set, game. Any more than that looks a lot like human storytelling, usually done in an attempt to manipulate other humans.

I may have been young, but given the dogmatic belief system preached to us, I despised the obvious hypocrisy. I seriously doubted God wanted me singing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ with a gun slung over my shoulder, eager to kill humans at the other end of the gun sight. I’d heard or read far too many Biblical passages of slaughters and bad Philistines and Hittites and Assyrians that seemed antithetical to the kinder teachings.

In nearly all cases, these stories were riddled with thousands of deaths in wars and everyone seemingly treating each other rather poorly in the name of what they considered to be the gods or God. As far back as I could recall, I considered this a great apostasy, a means to justify anything humans did in the name of God, whether positive or negative.

It just didn’t make sense. God gave us Earth, brains, and consciousness. The rest was up to us.

Besides, my own parents wouldn’t wish for me to harm my brothers, sisters, friends, or anyone else. Why would God? It seemed to me that religion, in general, spent too much time justifying its dogma, its narrative, its presumptive hierarchical structures and pedagogy. The religious powers were trying to compel me to follow that path obediently, even mindlessly.

After too much time kneeling on the hard concrete slab, we finally stopped praying. The slab was freezing cold, and my thin little knees, covered only by jeans, hurt like hell. I was elated when we finally jumped back in the truck.

I don’t recall much about the twenty mile hike down the Canyon that day. I remember peering over the side of the very narrow and treacherous trails, thinking I’d be a dead duck if I slipped. To our advantage, nobody was hiking up from the bottom that early in the morning, and we skipped along happily once the trails flattened out, anticipating the big arrival at the bottom.

In twenty miles of trail, your mind creates expectations, even well-deserved entitlements. Sitting by the water to cool off. Opening the canteens and wax paper-wrapped PB&J’s. Crunching down on potato chips. Our intended destination and bit of heaven was just minutes away.

Arriving at the canyon bottom, we were suddenly whacked by a blast of scorching air. Temperatures had shifted from barely tolerable cold at the top to blistering hot at the bottom.

Sweaty and tired, Colt and I realized we came ill-prepared. We each brought three sandwiches, a pair of jeans, and a long-sleeved flannel shirt. That was it for two anticipated days in the canyon bottom.

Noah was sweating profusely. He was in great shape, but the heat was overwhelming.

“How about we cool off in the river?” he suggested, a broad smile on his face. He was rightfully proud we had arrived at our destination by early afternoon.

We all shouted in unison, “Great!”

“But you, Greg and Terry, you can’t go. You’re too small, and I can’t keep track of you in the water, anyway. Maybe you’ll get into a side pool or something. You bigger guys,” he said, pointing in the distance upstream, “see that log over there on shore? We can grab that and float along for a hundred yards or so. That should cool us off enough, then we’ll come back here and let the smaller boys have their time in the water.”

I began to argue that I was a great swimmer, but Colt stopped me.

“Hey, you can’t swim as good as me,” he advised, like big brothers do, “and this will take only a few minutes. Just go down river to that point there and watch us as we go by.”

The three began stripping to their underwear. Ever weary of prior public underwear and water adventures we had endured, particularly multiple times at Oak Creek Canyon when our mother forgot to pack our bathing suits, Colt kept his red flannel shirt on in case any girls might be within visual range.

The three took off up river, sneakers on, and walked into the underbrush to push the log into the water.

I ran over to the point that Colt pointed to and could hardly wait to see them frolicking and waving as they went by. Maybe they’d let me go next, if it seemed safe enough. After all, the water didn’t appear to be moving that fast. It wasn’t a creek or stream by any means. It was indeed a full-sized river, but it seemed to meander so slowly at the top – and presumably all the way to the bottom.

I stood at the edge of a rock overhang, inches above the water, but the bushes obscured my view upstream. After a few minutes, I grew impatient. “Where the heck are they? They should have passed by now.”

Then I heard frantic yelling.

“What?” I answered. “Who’s screaming? Did someone call out my name?”

Then I looked to my left, across the river, and watched as a red flannel shirt slowly slid down the log, disappearing in water that now seemed to be moving much faster than before.

“Colt?” I wondered. “Maybe he lost his shirt in the water.”

I heard another scream.

“Greg, do you see him? Do you see your brother anywhere?”

Terry was running quickly over to me with his thoroughly drenched brother in tow, tripping over dry river rocks and pointing out into the torrent.

“The log kept turning,” his brother said, teeth chattering from the cold. “It rolled and we couldn’t stop it. Colt hung on, but it just kept spinning. Did you see him? Did he make it to shore?”

Then it hit me. That was Colt. It wasn’t his shirt that came off and got caught on the log. It was a flannel shirt on a pitching arm on my brother who was slipping into wet oblivion.

I ran downriver but the dense brush stopped me a hundred yards later. Urgently scanning the banks, I searched for a hand raised above the water or even a body floating on top. Anything red in the water.

There was nothing.