Field Notes on Energy

On grief, thermodynamics, and the strange persistence of the people we love

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

A few nights ago, I stood barefoot in my kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil.

The windows were open to break the heat and somewhere outside, a fox screamed into the dark with that almost human sound that always startles me no matter how many times I hear it. The radiator pipes knocked softly in the walls, though it is summer and they should be been silent. The whole flat felt full of small movements. Cooling metal. Wind lifting the curtain slightly from the sill. The low electric hum of things continuing.

And suddenly I thought of my mother. Not in the sharp, catastrophic way grief sometimes arrives. Not as anguish exactly. More like recognition. As if the room itself had briefly tilted toward her shape.

Grief has changed the way I experience ordinary matter.

Heat especially. The warmth left behind in bedsheets. Steam against my face. Sunlight resting on my skin. Sometimes I catch myself thinking about how recently warmth belonged to a body. How strange it is that heat can leave us and continue elsewhere. Into fabric. Into air. Into walls.

Into the world.

There is a truth in physics that grief keeps returning me to: energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only change form.

I don’t mean this literally. Or perhaps grief loosens the meaning of literally.

Because bereavement does something peculiar to the mind. It makes you resistant to disappearance. The body understands death intellectually long before it understands it emotionally. Emotion keeps searching for continuity long after logic has closed the case.

And so you begin looking for people everywhere.

In habits you did not notice becoming your own. In phrases that leave your mouth carrying someone else’s cadence. In the instinct to reach for a phone before remembering there is nowhere for the call to go. In gestures inherited so completely they feel biological.

Sometimes I think grief is partly the refusal to believe that a life can simply stop.

Not memory or influence or love. The actual energetic force of a person. Their particular way of moving through the world. Their laughter disturbing the air. Their hands warming ceramic mugs. Their body taking up physical space beside yours and altering, however slightly, the atmosphere around it.

My mother cooked with cast iron pans blackened from decades of use. Even now, when oil hits heat and the kitchen fills with that first rich smell of onions softening, I feel something in me recognise her before I consciously think of her. Something quicker than memory. More bodily.

As though part of loving someone deeply is allowing them to rearrange your internal architecture permanently.

The truth is, we leave traces of ourselves everywhere.

Skin cells caught in blankets. Fingerprints on glasses. Hair wound into coat linings. Heat absorbed into furniture cushions. Vibrations from our voices travelling outward in widening waves long after the sound itself disappears.

Science can explain this plainly. Matter transforms. Energy transfers. Nothing is annihilated. But grief reaches for these ideas with almost spiritual hunger because they offer language for something mourners feel instinctively: the sense that the people we love do not become nowhere all at once.

They become harder to locate.

I think this is why certain moments undo us unexpectedly. A stranger laughing in the exact cadence of someone gone. A perfume molecule trapped for years in the collar of a coat. The radiator knocking at night in a rhythm so familiar your body responds before thought catches up.

Tell me that is not a kind of haunting?

Tell me love does not alter the molecular structure of a life?

Lately I have been thinking, too, about my own eventual disappearance. Not in a morbid way, I feel more curiosity than fear.

One day, my own energy will loosen from this body. The heat of my hands will leave the objects I touch. My voice will stop arriving in rooms. The particular arrangement of atoms currently calling itself me will scatter outward into other forms.

And yet.

I keep hoping some part of me will remain in motion.

Not grandly. Not monumentally.

I hope someone I love will stand in sunlight and think of me without sadness swallowing them whole. I hope my laughter lives on in somebody else’s mouth. I hope the people I leave behind feel, in ordinary moments, that they were loved very well.

Maybe this is all any of us are really trying to do. Leave warmth behind us. Leave evidence of having been here.

Perhaps grief itself is evidence too. Proof that one life pressed hard enough against another to leave an imprint.

These thoughts about where energy goes developed first into a poem and I wanted to share it with you:

“Field Notes on Energy”

Nothing disappears.
This is the first law:
the heat of her hands
did not vanish.
it slipped quietly into the walls,
the kettle steam,
the breath of trees.

Every atom that held her
refused extinction.

Her laughter loosened particles into the air.
Her pulse disturbed the fabric of things.
Even now, the world carries
the riot of her being.

So when I stand in sunlight
warming my face,
when the floorboards creak at night,
when the radiator spits and knocks.

tell me that isn’t her
still pressing herself
into matter.

Perhaps this is the closest grief comes to faith. A quiet turning toward the idea that love does not end where presence ends, but continues as change, as diffusion, as the slow becoming of everything into everything else. That what we call loss is only the limits of our seeing, not the limits of what remains.

And so we learn to live inside this strange inheritance: a world still full of the people we have loved, altered into light, into heat, into the ordinary shimmer of matter moving on.

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