The question of whether immortality in any form exists has long been both a question and challenge for philosophers, theoretical physicists and writers, and in some versions, a claim and faith for many religions past and present.

And not just them, most people, including me, wonder whether anything of us will survive the grave.

One of my favorite authors is Oliver Sacks, both for the clarity and poetic artistry with which he wrote, and his passion for life, science and especially for him, the periodic table.

Some of his best writing came toward the end of his life when in the growing shadow of metastatic melanoma, he wrote his last and my favorite book, “Gratitude,” in which he summed up what it meant to him to be a sentient being:

“I have been increasingly conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his (or her) own path, to live his (or her) own life, to die his (or her) own death.”

Sacks was born into an Orthodox Jewish family and neighborhood in London, U.K., from which family and roots he was cast out when he revealed that he was gay.

Until the end of his life nearly six decades later he lived in the United States where he became a neurologist, scientist and chronicler of human nature, and wrote his book, “Awakenings.”

The latter became a movie that chronicled life for those with severe brain disorders especially late-stage Parkinsonian disorders.

The book, movie and his fascination with bizarre cases in neurology such as “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” made him a favorite of the New York Times, National Public Radio and the public.

When Sacks learned that his cousin Marjorie — a practising physician until her ninety-eighth year, and a protégé of his mother — was nearing death, Sacks phoned her and was in turn invited together with his partner to Israel to celebrate her hundredth birthday.

With that invitation and visit, almost 60 years of separation from his Orthodox family came to an end — and just in time before Sacks’ own death.

Throughout his life, he remained a cultural Jew at heart well versed in the traditions of his cultural origins but no believer in God or any version of an afterlife, save what records he left behind in his writings.

Not long before his death he wrote these moving lines, which gather together his cultural roots in the Sabbath, science, life and his end:

“And now, weak, short of breath, my once-firm muscles melted away by cancer, I find my thoughts increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual, but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life — achieving a sense of peace within oneself. I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest.”

That’s Sacks’ take on immortality, which mirrors my own — no heaven and no hell except on Earth, of which there is an abundance of both in the best and worst of the human spirit and behavior.

No God in the narrow sense with which most traditions see God, and no immortality for the body or soul.

Only ephemeral memories in the minds of those who follow us and what survives for a generation or two of the memorabilia we leave behind.

Immortality is not the fate of the universe, not for particles, not for atoms, molecules, not for life, whether simple or highly complex social species such as ours, or anything that exists writ large in the case of the universe or tiny in the case of the subatomic universe.

All are products of a mystery as yet unresolved: What preceded the Big Bang? Going further, how will our universe end, and are there other universes? All are unanswerable questions for the foreseeable future at least and perhaps for the lifetime of our species going forward.

Oliver Sacks was both a realist and optimist about life, as I hope I am in my better moments.

Like him, I think it’s important to sort out as best as we can what’s important in life, celebrate that life and those of others, learn and be curious, and remember that we are players on a giant stage in space and time with roles to play between our beginnings and endings.

That’s our legacy and the only form of immortality open to us as sentient beings.

No other species, except probably the neanderthals, dwelt on the hereafter and some version of immortality in their creation stories.

Those stories were based on their experience fueled by their powers of speech and vivid imagination to explain and enhance the worlds they inhabited.

Those same cognitive powers disciplined by the methods of science, further expanded our understanding of the natural world to the limits of what science can do.

Sacks was part of that contradiction between culture and science and for him at least found peace in the tension between the two.

Dr. William Brown is a professor of neurology at McMaster University and co-founder of the InfoHealth series at the Niagara-on-the-Lake Public Library.