The Tralfamadorian View on Things

yes, well, i have just started reading Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (an early christmas present from Jess) and if you didn't know this already, Kurt Vonnegut always ties his books into eachother. Not like they're a series, he will just randomly mention something from one of his other books and tie it into the story. So anyway, Slaughterhouse-Five. I've only just begun reading it, in fact I'm only on Chapter Two, but already, it has tied The Sirens of Titan into it, in great length. Meaning that the main character claims to have been a prisoner on Tralfamadore(the alien planet that created the human race), where he was kept naked in a zoo with Montana Wildhack, a movie star from Earth who was captured. The reason why I'm going so far into the plot line is because the main character, Billy Pilgrim, is thought to have gone senile, and he keeps trying to prove his sanity by writing letters to the Illium newspaper, talking about the Tralfamadorians and how they see in four dimensions. So to them, they see time as ever-living, not like we do, where one moment passes and then it's gone, they see all moments of time at the same time, as though they were looking at a filmstrip, and they can rewind whenever they want. So if someone dies, they don't see the corpse as dead, they see them as looking a lot worse in that moment than they looked in all the other moments when they were fine. "The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, have always existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments, just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth, that one moment follows another one, like a string of beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is 'So it goes.'"
The reason I put this up here is that I would like to believe that this is true; that at some point all the people we love who have died, and will die, are really still alive. Kurt Vonnegut is right that thry live on in the past, and though I believe that there's a possibility that the literal translation is possible, I know for a fact that the figurative translation is possible: People live on through our memories, and the legacies that they left behind.
~~"Have you ever heard a joke so many times, you've forgotten why it's funny? And then you hear it again and suddenly it's new? You remember why you loved it in the first place. That was my father's final joke, i guess. A man tells his stories so many times that he becomes the stories. They live on after him. And in that way, he becomes immortal." -Big Fish

Food for thought.