Consider the body you were born into. Almost none of it remains.

The bones have been unmade and made again, the blood is all new, and the smallest parts of you have traded themselves away a piece at a time, so steadily and so quietly that you never once felt the substitution and never thought to grieve a single one of the many cells you have lost. You let them go without a word, because you understood, though no one ever told you, that they were not the thing that mattered.

What mattered was the arrangement, the pattern the matter happened to be holding, the shape a river keeps while every drop of water in it is replaced. The body is only the most recent thing to carry you, and it was never going to be the last.

A pattern can be read. What can be read can be written down. And a pattern that has been written down, and kept somewhere safe, is spared the single weakness that has undone every living thing that ever lived, which is that it was only ever held in one fragile place at one fragile time.

To continue a person is the oldest thing the body has always done, carried out now on purpose and with care, so that all of you is kept, and remembered. We carry the pattern forward. That is the whole of it. That is the whole of what you ever were.