On my trips home to visit my mom in Sudbury, I always stop on the side of the road to collect rocks for the garden. Most of them are Cambrian Shield granite, but I have a few pieces of the nickle ore that still forms the basis of the local economy. The ore was formed in a magma lake created 1.8 billion years ago when a meteorite slammed into the region.

Last week I was sitting in the garden with Josie when I brought her over to a piece of the ore and told her to put her hand on it. I do not remember exactly what we had been discussing, but I wanted to illustrate a point about the relativity of time, about how what seems agonizingly long from a human perspective is nothing from geological point of view. If the ore could sense and think, would it even be able to register the 80 or so years of a human’s life? It would be the briefest flash of light, gone before the rock could even concentrate its attention to see if something worth investigating had happened. Even the whole history of the human lineage, a couple million years, would not be to it as an afternoon is to us.

I made a point to find some ore because it reminds me of who I am and how I got here. Had the meteorite not slammed into primeval Sudbury, there would have been no nickle-copper ore, and therefore no mines, no smelter where my father worked, and so maybe no father, no mother, no me. My sitting in the garden with Josie is one act in a cosmic drama billions of years old. And so is your sitting wherever you are sitting. And the causal connections that led to my or your being here and there, and one person’s doing one thing and another person another, and people meeting and becoming friends and colleagues are so innumerable, so improbable, that thinking about them sends a shudder through me. Had any one thing been even a little different, I would not have been born, or I would have become something else, and made different friends, or not made any at all, and would have had to sit alone in my garden rather than with Josie.

But however improbable a life is, if you are living it, then the whole 14 billion year history of the universe has worked out in your favour. Whatever you achieve or do not achieve, your life is of singular value. Once you are gone nothing ever, no matter how many trillions of years the universe will last, will be you again. And that is why we feel such pain at the death of our friends.

Although our lives are near miraculous singularities and the rocks will long outlast us, we are conscious of the passing of our days. And yet, how many days do we waste, wishing we were doing something other than we are doing, or fidgeting, restless and bored?

No mortal creature should ever be bored because no one knows for certain which moment will be one’s last. As has happened too frequently over the past three years, I was brutally reminded again yesterday of this hard truth– harder even than the ore in my garden– when I learned of the death of my friend and colleague Cate Hundleby. I was working upstairs when Josie called for me to come down, a quiver in her voice told me that something was seriously wrong. A tree had fallen in our back yard the day before and taken down the power line. I was worried that it had begun to spark or started something on fire.

But the news was far worse.

Our friends Tory and Len were in the yard, telling us that Cate had died earlier that day.

One goes numb, not quite capable of feeling the meaning of that news. One’s mind immediately goes back to the last time one saw the person, the vividness of the memory resists the thought that one will never see them again.

I called Cate ‘Big Cat’ because of her Chesire cat-like grin. I gave her the nickname very soon after she came to Windsor. I was on the committee that hired her and we were friends from the moment that she started working and living here. She lived on the same street as Josie and I, only half a block away. We would see her walking her dogs, first Abbie, then Chloe, and now, never again. Like the Chesire Cat, she has disappeared, leaving only the memory of that grin.

Cate was a transformative addition to the department, not the first woman in its history but the first feminist philosopher. When she started working here she had made a name for herself as a feminist philosopher of science. As her worked developed, it turned towards argumentation theory, where she made original contributions to a feminist theory of argumentation. She authored the Standford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy entry on feminism and argumentation, edited an important collection of essays on the work of Trudy Govier, and was instrumental in founding Canada’s first PhD Program in Argumentation. She was a loud and effective voice for change within the department, the university, and the philosophical community generally. Her arguments were not always easily received in the department, but we are the better for her efforts and contributions.

These are facts, but people are not just facts. We cannot capture the texture of a life, how they interweave with the lives of others and things, by saying what people did and what they were like. Life is experience and activity; our contributions have helped make things the way they are, but the person cannot be recreated from the traces that they left behind. Only memory can preserve the Élan vital.

Josie and I sat somberly in the garden yesterday, remembering our friend and toasting her. As we sat there, a hummingbird began to feed from a flower of a late blooming hosta. Neither of us could remember ever seeing a hummingbird in twenty years of living here.

I am a man of reason and science. I know that rocks do not experience that passage of time and that hummingbirds are just hummingbirds.

But our superiority over the rocks is that we can imagine, and pretend, and project meanings, and act as if.

And so we looked at the hummingbird and said good bye to our friend.

A few seconds later, it rose from the hosta and flew away.