“Water: 35 liters. Carbon: 20 kilograms. Ammonia: four liters. Lime: 1.5 kilograms. Phosphorous: 800 grams. Salt: 250 grams. Saltpeter: 100 grams. Sulfur, 80 grams. Fluorine, 7.5; iron, five; silicon, three grams; and trace amounts of 15 other elements.”
These, Fullmetal Alchemist Edward Elric explains to a desolated young woman named Rose, who mourns the sudden death of her boyfriend and waits on a false priest to bring him back to life, are “all the ingredients of the adult human body, down to the last specks of protein in your eyelashes.” Scientifically, that’s not quite on target, and philosophically, it isn’t either, as Ed knows all too well: “There’s still something missing—something scientists haven’t been able to find in centuries of research.”
When we lose someone, we don’t mourn the removal of elements and their fleshy container from the world. Surely we miss the physical closeness, holding them and being held, but we don’t miss the matter from which they were made. We mourn the person. We mourn the soul.
That word, “soul,” has many meanings: the Oxford-American Dictionary defines it as “the spiritual or immaterial part of a human being or animal, regarded as immortal,” as well as “a person’s moral or emotional nature or sense of identity,” their “emotional or intellectual energy or intensity, especially as revealed in a work of art or an artistic performance,” and “the essence or embodiment of a specified quality.” Elements don’t make someone an individual. Humans are too complex for that.
For one, those elements don’t disappear when someone dies. They go into the ground, minerals reinvigorating the soil we till, allowing plants to grow, animals to feed, and the circle of life to go on. The soul, though, is different. It’s the spirit, the inner self, of a person we miss most when they die—that lost essence of who they were.
That’s also what makes loss feel so overwhelming and final for those of nearly all faiths and temperaments. You don’t need to believe in any god to believe in a soul. You just need to know a person. We can believe whatever we want, but when it comes to what happens to the soul, the essence of a person, when someone dies, we just can’t know. What we do know is that they don’t come back.
That’s not for want of trying. Bringing back the dead is one of the oldest fixations of humankind, and every religion and culture on Earth has at least one legend involving some form of necromancy. It’s all over pop culture, too, from the Harry Potter and A Song of Ice and Fire series to superhero comics and E.T. Failed resurrection, too, is prominent. perhaps nowhere more than in Fullmetal Alchemist.
Edward Elric and his brother, Alphonse, young as they are, know better than most alchemists—the scientists of this universe, who can perform feats that qualify as nothing short of magic—the futility of resurrection. The Elrics’ father abandoned them and their mother when they were young, and their mother’s death, a few years after, left them devastated by their loss. So they attempted human transmutation, gathering the aforementioned elements and placing them inside a transmutation circle, to which they added drops of their own blood, intended to provide the “soul data” to bring their mother back.
The price, for attempting the impossible, was dire: Ed lost his left leg, and Al lost his entire body, forcing Ed to attempt the act once more, sacrificing his right arm to bind Al’s soul to a suit of armor. And the monstrous thing they brought into the world only to die a few agonizing moments later was certainly not their mother.
It’s the rare pop culture tale that doesn’t view resurrection hopefully. In much pop fiction, life is fairly cheap. Sure, Superman dies, but he pretty much always comes back. But there are no Lazarus pits in this world, and equivalent exchange is a bust: death can’t pay for life, and even if it could, the same problem would remain. A different soul would be lost for good. And it might have to be you.
It’s something of a heavy-handed (or metal-armed) metaphor for survivor’s guilt, a significant symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder. The Elrics can, and should, serve as a lesson on processing loss and trauma—and a hard-earned one at that. “The best way out is always through,” Robert Frost wrote in a oft-pilfered line, which has morphed into a cliché now so pervasive it practically provides a cottage industry for headline writers alone. Yet its truth remains.
The sudden permanent absence of another soul to which one has become bonded is always a tragedy, in part because of its inevitability. In the Elric’s case, as children who lose their mother, it’s even more tragic. Yet everything we love, we lose. It’s only a matter of time. Most children bury their mothers someday. But there’s nothing to do but go along with it—pick up the spade, plant a flower, and learn to live with the loss. Another pop culture cliché, the Kübler-Ross model, better known as the five stages of grief, doesn’t end in “resurrection.” It doesn’t end in “reversal,” either. It ends in acceptance. There’s no other way, alchemy or no alchemy.
“People don’t come back from the dead, Rose,” Ed says to Rose later. “Not ever.” Water and salt, carbon and iron and the rest return to the earth. But souls don’t come back. Those who obsess over trying can lose more than their arms, or legs, or bodies. They can lose themselves. What a tragedy, to lose two souls for the price of one.
The answer to loss doesn’t lie in alchemy, or necromancy. It lies in the self, in the soul that remains, and what it does to accept, to learn, to push through. “Keep moving forward,” Ed tells Rose, as he and the suit of armor housing his brother’s soul trudge on, seeking to find a way to get their bodies back—to get past the tragedy and move on. There is no other way. Not even with a philosopher’s stone.
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