Good For You, Dad

A rational understanding of life and death

Dad died recently. He impacted many people over 95 years. He was recognised professionally, respected socially and loved by the family and friends he nurtured. He worked hard, and he encouraged those around him to do the same. He did this by example, with a passionate curiosity and sense of fun.

He was an engineer of distinction. Unsatisfied with just a physical explanation of how the world works, he wanted to improve it. But he wanted to work with others and help them do the same.

He designed machines that measured and shaped things to atomic-level accuracy. Things so near to perfection that when he was born, they would have been indistinguishable from magic; today we take them for granted.

A few years ago, we shared a bottle of water. He looked at the plastic closure that clipped shut, forming a perfect seal, with a satisfied smile. He spoke, as he often did, at some length about the high-precision moulding and machining required for the bottle top’s mass production. But that was just Dad.

The ideas he helped shape are everywhere, even in the machine-curved mirrors onboard the James Webb telescope, a million miles from here, right now recording and communicating information about the universe we know so little. A universe about which he was constantly curious.

Dad was determined to shape and improve things, but he didn’t do it alone; he wanted to take people with him and ultimately help them forge their own paths. For that, he needed updates.

But Dad didn’t say the how-are-you? of common parlance; he wanted data he could work with, an audit trail. To a teenager, this felt intrusive and controlling, but it was paternal and caring; its intent was hopeful and aspirational, not for him, but for you.

For Dad, it was about people and their ideas and where they could lead, and his signature of acceptance was: Good For You. Not a judgmental comment of approval; it contained no irony. He wanted acknowledgement that you were pursuing your fulfilment, whatever that meant to you; that’s what gave him satisfaction.

Dad wasn’t a conformist. For him, the customs of others all too often act as a brake to progress and happiness. He favoured experiments in living, but he also expected a full assessment of their results. Do it, but be sure to learn from it.

Above all, Dad was a rationalist and a humanist, never seeking the comfort of unevidenced belief. He fully embraced a world governed by physical laws with all its challenging consequences.

Our instinct is to see death as a subtraction, a final departure. But in physics, death is not destruction but transformation. Yet, all too often, our linguistic shorthands ignore evident truths.

Our egos deceive us. But we are no more than momentary transformational processes brought together by rare combinations of energy and matter. As such, we cannot be created or destroyed. The universe keeps a perfect account of all that there is, ever has been and ever will be. Death isn’t a disappearance into nothingness, but a dispersal into everything.

We are not newcomers to reality, but ancient inhabitants of the universe, fleetingly organised into recognisable forms of self-awareness. Each of us is a unique dance of atoms in a complex repeating pattern.

Such cold assertions might be disturbing, but illustrate that the wonder of human life lies in its extraordinary rarity. We are all incredible moments where the universe achieves the impossible: it looks at itself. The fact that this pattern is temporary does not diminish its value; it makes its occurrence more wondrous.

The deceased are not separate from the universe but part of it, briefly becoming sufficiently organised to feel joy, love and curiosity. We are the cosmos briefly made conscious. We could be its only self-awareness.

Dad danced well. Now ended, his dance made a lasting impact on the physical world. And for those of us fortunate enough to share his life, he assisted in our own choreography. In turn, he has influenced how we might now do the same for those who continue to dance after us.

Good For You, Dad.

Patrick McKeown (1930-2026)

Husband, father, grandfather and great-grandfather.

Engineer

Humanist