“If we owe regard to the memory of the dead, there is yet more respect to be paid to knowledge, to virtue, and to truth.” -Samuel Johnson
Grandpa Scott died in 1990. America had yet to fully emerge out of the shadow of the bubble economy and geeky neonsynthpopculture of the 80’s; large cell phones were being toted around and the Internet was just arriving at doorsteps, having just lost its baby fat after its military incubation. The Information Age was in its inkling stage, still lacking the full civilian and business participation that it would eventually convert. This is why it was strange, that in 2007, my grandfather’s name would still exist in the digital records of credit card companies, that he could still be eligible for $500 maximum Visa cards, and still receive advertisements and coupons from a handful of various conglomerations through the U.S. Postal Office. Had businesses already converted over to digital records by the early 90’s? Or had my grandpa’s paper file eventually become digital? I don’t know. But what is more disturbing is that my father, who passed away in 2006, receives more mail than I do. From Harley Davidson invites, Playboy re-subscriptions, AARP membership card offers, letters from Publishers Clearing House, and, of course, credit card pre-approvals. At my current apartment he receives at least one piece of mail a day. Is this what society awards a man who worked a full-time job for three-plus decades, held down mortgage payments, had three credit cards, owned two cars and a motorcycle, smoked Marlboro cigarettes (enough to use Marlboro mileage to “barter” for a two-man tent, sleeping bag, rain jacket, camping lamp, long sleeve shirt, a blanket, …), and bought occasionally from mail-in catalogs? More mail? Is this what the system spews back at us after we’ve put our sweat, money, and hopes into it? Couldn’t these companies at least have the decency to delete his name from their databases when he died?
No, the Information Age is only now beginning to be understood, and utilized efficiently and effectively. When he died, the funeral home told the State Department, who in turn reported to relevant federal departments. I don’t blame the funeral home; they did their job. And the state or federal government isn’t to blame either. I’d point my shaky finger at that shabbily dressed collective of money-launderers, who don’t care about the individual, not enough at least to let them rest in peace.
But weren’t the companies merely trying to meet my father’s demands? They might not be evil after all. He had a lot of stuff he left behind; and of those things, I took: an old-timey children’s pinball game (circa 1950), a small collection of rusty knives (varying in size, from 2-inch folding blade to a six inch “Rambo” knife) a photo of Grandpa Scott taken while on tour during the Korean War (he is smiling happily with a Korean woman sitting closely at his side), a Marlboro hiking backpack, two-dozen books of matches, a plastic container of tiny metal balls with Chinese lettering (belonging to another children’s game??), a backgammon/chess play set, a traveling Rolls Razor (my Grandpa’s), personal files (medical records, criminal history report, several packets from the National Multiple Sclerosis Society with highlighted sentences; two essays, one entitled, ‘Boundaries: Tools of Respect in the Relationship with the Addict’, and the other, ‘Are You Trying Too Hard to Please?’; address book, debt book, and his receipts for the last year and a half of his life, two that were dated one day before his death), notebooks (with indebted names, list of Hawaiian islands he had doted on moving to or the carpentry details for an extension he had planned on adding to his house), and his leather wallet.
Among everything, the wallet was the most important; it was emblematic. In its entirety, it represented everything I came to dislike about the world: my father, capitalism, materialism, and the “normal” life. Throughout high school I didn’t carry a wallet; my father suggested that I should own one, but he didn’t persist. Throughout college I went walletless, shoving loose bills in my back pockets and carrying only my ID card. Once, I made a make-shift duct-tape “cardholder” that held only my debit card and ID.
By the time I inherited his wallet, at the age of 23, that angst had faded. During college and his death I met my father again, and we bonded. Yes, a touching lighthearted story for the fam: when I took the wallet, it was an acceptance of everything he is in me. It was emblematic as the penultimate point our relationship had struggled to reach. It took his death to be given that realization. Today, I don’t carry it to prove loyalty or honor: I carry it because it is mine. It is my personal consubstantiation.
Since his death I have wondered if every time I have read his notes he was rolling in his grave; or whether or not his spirit was summoned. If his possessions invoke his personality (which is the very reason we keep personal items), doesn’t his personality, to some extent, induce his spirit? Of course, he was (and people are) more than his possessions, yet they provoked memories within me, that, if nothing else, summoned his spiritual content. Is there anything worse than provoking the dead? How can my father ever rest in peace if I can’t let his memories be buried with him? Certainly my father continues to live within me; he is one-half of me and to live forward, now, is to best commemorate his life, no? He gave me life to succeed and live, not to wallow in memories of his life. If I am to pay my respect to him, I must let him “go gentle into the good night.”
With certain possessions we can construct a timeline; footprints of dates and activities through time; reenact moments of their lives that we were not given witness to. It is more than an archaeological record because we know the person by whom the possessions were kept. Illusory: I am there with him, picturing him standing in line at the post office, waiting to mail the package in his hands, the address in his clumsy all caps handwriting, a cane in his right hand, and as the receipt shows, purchasing a money order; he is muttering under his breath; he is nervous to be there and doesn’t want to talk to the man standing behind the counter. Oddly, those are activities I normally dread in my life, but his death changed those feelings and suddenly those insignificant trivialities became very important, perhaps necessary. With it, I am able to better understand my father. Unknowingly, we hope that these possessions will give us an answer, or at least a clue, anything to ease the suffering. Can an object really give us an answer?
What I am guilty of, as are most Americans, is taking a possession, whether it is a family heirloom or article of clothing, and holding onto it for as long as I can. We all grieve in our own way. Observant Jews mourn for a year (following strict rules of dress, diet, and customs) and then mourning is over. It is considered almost sacrilegious to continue mourning. In many Buddhist countries, they mourn for 49 days and then only on the anniversary for seven years afterwards. Perhaps Americans can, eventually, when we are able to see through the materialistic understanding of others and ourselves, be able to devise a better way to mourn. For now, we will sip our brewing sadness cautiously, and take it one sip at a time. The American tradition reveals some of its roots. Thus it continues.
One of the ways Americans mourn is by having a funeral and having a burial or spreading of the ashes. And generally, if someone is buried, he or she is commemorated by a tombstone, or if someone is cremated, then he or she is remembered by the urn. When my father died, I couldn’t afford a tombstone. For $600, a nameplate could be placed into the ground. Oddly, six months after his death, a nameplate appeared mysteriously, by an anonymous donor.
When Americans cannot give their deceased a proper burial, it can mean travesty. Just think of all those who grieve for P.O.Ws./M.I.As. This tradition runs deep. And interestingly, this might be a clue to why Americans mourn with possessions.
During the Civil War, when so many of America’s sons died alone on the war field, which resulted in sending consoling letters home to the bereft as a testament of identity, families began cherishing anything significant in the absence of their loved one’s body. As Drew Gilpin Faust explains in her book, This Republic of Suffering, American citizens hoped that everyone had the “Good Death.” In summary, it was to die in your home surrounded by family and to make peace with your sins and repent so that everyone knew that you died in peace (and so that they knew they could meet you again in heaven). But with soldiers dying in war, families could not know how their sons died. Often the soldiers themselves wrote farewell letters before dying (many deaths were slow; most deaths were began with infection), or if they could not, their friends would send home a letter addressing, mostly, the deceased’s composition (during or after death) and any last words or thoughts given by the dying. The families were left with a short letter and maybe an article of clothing or a personal possession. Civil War families, uncertain of their child’s ascension to heaven, might mourn an entire lifetime. It is certainly possible that because Civil War era families were quite accustomed to death (due to high birth mortality rates, shorter lives, no penicillin, etc.), they didn’t mourn for an entire lifetime. However, that most people died at home, war death, being aberrant, caused families to mourn in a different way.
How would I have mourned had my father died in a secluded jungle in the Amazon (having cut off all ties with the world, etc.)? Would he have had a more peaceful death? Would his memory have faded sooner so that his name would disappear into oblivion? Would I have been able to deal with his death any better? Could I accept his death more easily?
A good friend of mine once told me that she would never stop missing her father. He had died ten years earlier. My first thought was, ‘Come on, you can’t be serious?’ And my subsequent thought was, ‘I’ll never do that.’ Since the death of my father was still fresh, I felt masculine bravado at my own emotions: I was still tender in dealing with them and believed that I had gone through the grieving. However, I was still in shock of his death, or perhaps had gone through anger and sorrow and come back around to shock. My emotions felt cyclical, as they are wont to do.
At the time, I had mistaken her word ‘missing’ for ‘mourning.’ Yes, I had put my foot in my mouth, but weren’t my remarks somewhat legitimate? Given the evidence (a picture of him at her computer, and I believe wearing a bracelet from him), my confusion is not entirely out of line. My line of sight saw possessions as acts of mourning, and I certainly didn’t want to be mourning for ten years. I didn’t want to revolve around grief. Yet, I reiterate, her complexity of emotional strings, which I could not understand, were delicate flashes of longing; it wasn’t the inner turmoil I had been feeling at that moment.
The rest of America, myself included, is right beside her. The possessions we keep are emblems of the body. Whether or not these help or retard the process of mourning is the question at hand. Or is the more immediate question, “Are these possessions necessary for mourning?” I would argue that as long as it doesn’t prolong our sorrow, it is necessary.
The morning my father died I called out of work at the hotel, but later that evening I reported to work at the Chinese restaurant. I pretended to be fine, as if I nothing happened. This is a trend that plagues Americans; the inability to face our emotions in their rawest forms. We will find something else to occupy our time so that we won’t have to deal with their immediacy, vain about their true nature; that they are always raw until you deal with them, until you handle them and understand them. I was one of those people who ignored my feelings, and I acted like I wasn’t. After three years passed, I realized that by neglecting my emotions they got buried and separated and became foreign.
The death of a loved one is the articulation of your life with the person; how he or she filled your life. What did my father mean to me while he was alive? What have I lost? How do I deal and perceive the void that has be given? Just like any relationship, the further it recedes into memory, it fades. The longer I didn’t confront his death, the more it grew ensnared with multitudes of other emotions; muscle insulated by fat. The intrusion was a source of embitterment and further estrangement of my own emotions. When they reemerged (after some serious writing about the topic), they were distant cousins, or worse, strangers to me. Strangers to whom we sometimes say, “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” But like a stranger, an emotion is a breathing, living, organic being with a heart of its own; often netted in the cobwebs of our closets; intertwined like one wiki page to the forty others nested within it.
The Internet has yet to last an entire generation, and why it shouldn’t is prophecy. Yet, as the Information Age matures, as the Internet becomes better organized and more easily searchable, as personal information becomes digitized, it will change how we remember. History is no longer exclusively for paper or our memories. Our lives, which include our history, have been interpolated by the digital world. Websites that are dedicated to the deceased alone mark a pioneering of eternal remembrance; drifting serenely and forever frozen like a stuffed animal through the echelons of each succeeding generation (see http://www.mydeathspace.com). Websites can be permanent memorials with photos and commentaries from friends and family. Not only does the Internet externalize death, it also follows the evolution of the effect of death; friends share their emotions publicly and engage in grieving together. Family members report ‘John would have been 35 today!’ and may write an aside that he is missed. In a twist of things, it fills the void left be the departed.
Although a website maintains such a dynamic record, what does it mean for our presently encroaching deaths? Does it help us accept our own anymore than we used to? And can we get over someone whose history remains so fluid and alive? Or is this the new way Americans mourn someone? Instead of a small, private circle of people having the only access to the deceased’s life, everyone can now “share a life.” We will always have feelings attached to those we’ve shared our life with: at the very least we’ve given them a part of us and when they die, as the cliché goes, a part of us dies too. Perhaps our digital gravestones are erected to mourn the small part of us that has died.
Even if critics believe that these electronic memorials are pathetic and invoke partial and incomplete persons, incomplete because in death people write only the niceties, no back stabbing so to speak, we must give them a moment in our lives. For we too, although fighting to live meaningful lives, deal with our encroaching death. We too wish to live for as long as we can, and in death, to be remembered for something more than a grotesque being. We are not here to make enemies: we want to rejoice, in the light of family and friends and goodness and God and such. My father never wanted an open casket funeral; he didn’t want to be ‘gawked’ at. But we gave him one because in spite of his voiced words, we knew that his friends and family needed to see him. Just so that when we knelt and said our prayers, we could see him. In that sense, it was as if he was watching us. And in that sense, provoking that spirit every now and again, with our possession, we are being watched, heard, and loved.
My mourning has passed; I continue to miss him from time to time: I knew he had tripped walking down the stairs and had a minor heart attack. When the paramedics arrived, he was D.O.A. I remember as he lay resting still in the hospital bed. He looked as if he’d been sleeping, but the lack of breath confused my immediate intuition. It seemed a hoax, and I wanted to see a deep breath of air go into his lungs. He looked pale, but he was still warm to the touch. I was oblivious to any questions or concerns. In my mind, a door had slammed, forced shut by a passing cool breeze, taking the hot air from one room, and pulling it into another. I spoke to him and cried. I loved him more than before; another door had opened. I didn’t want it, but it was there. I struggled to understand my own position; I wondered how long the feelings would last. I’ve decided to write a letter and tell him about it.
Grandpa Scott died in 1990. America had yet to fully emerge out of the shadow of the bubble economy and geeky neonsynthpopculture of the 80’s; large cell phones were being toted around and the Internet was just arriving at doorsteps, having just lost its baby fat after its military incubation. The Information Age was in its inkling stage, still lacking the full civilian and business participation that it would eventually convert. This is why it was strange, that in 2007, my grandfather’s name would still exist in the digital records of credit card companies, that he could still be eligible for $500 maximum Visa cards, and still receive advertisements and coupons from a handful of various conglomerations through the U.S. Postal Office. Had businesses already converted over to digital records by the early 90’s? Or had my grandpa’s paper file eventually become digital? I don’t know. But what is more disturbing is that my father, who passed away in 2006, receives more mail than I do. From Harley Davidson invites, Playboy re-subscriptions, AARP membership card offers, letters from Publishers Clearing House, and, of course, credit card pre-approvals. At my current apartment he receives at least one piece of mail a day. Is this what society awards a man who worked a full-time job for three-plus decades, held down mortgage payments, had three credit cards, owned two cars and a motorcycle, smoked Marlboro cigarettes (enough to use Marlboro mileage to “barter” for a two-man tent, sleeping bag, rain jacket, camping lamp, long sleeve shirt, a blanket, …), and bought occasionally from mail-in catalogs? More mail? Is this what the system spews back at us after we’ve put our sweat, money, and hopes into it? Couldn’t these companies at least have the decency to delete his name from their databases when he died?
No, the Information Age is only now beginning to be understood, and utilized efficiently and effectively. When he died, the funeral home told the State Department, who in turn reported to relevant federal departments. I don’t blame the funeral home; they did their job. And the state or federal government isn’t to blame either. I’d point my shaky finger at that shabbily dressed collective of money-launderers, who don’t care about the individual, not enough at least to let them rest in peace.
But weren’t the companies merely trying to meet my father’s demands? They might not be evil after all. He had a lot of stuff he left behind; and of those things, I took: an old-timey children’s pinball game (circa 1950), a small collection of rusty knives (varying in size, from 2-inch folding blade to a six inch “Rambo” knife) a photo of Grandpa Scott taken while on tour during the Korean War (he is smiling happily with a Korean woman sitting closely at his side), a Marlboro hiking backpack, two-dozen books of matches, a plastic container of tiny metal balls with Chinese lettering (belonging to another children’s game??), a backgammon/chess play set, a traveling Rolls Razor (my Grandpa’s), personal files (medical records, criminal history report, several packets from the National Multiple Sclerosis Society with highlighted sentences; two essays, one entitled, ‘Boundaries: Tools of Respect in the Relationship with the Addict’, and the other, ‘Are You Trying Too Hard to Please?’; address book, debt book, and his receipts for the last year and a half of his life, two that were dated one day before his death), notebooks (with indebted names, list of Hawaiian islands he had doted on moving to or the carpentry details for an extension he had planned on adding to his house), and his leather wallet.
Among everything, the wallet was the most important; it was emblematic. In its entirety, it represented everything I came to dislike about the world: my father, capitalism, materialism, and the “normal” life. Throughout high school I didn’t carry a wallet; my father suggested that I should own one, but he didn’t persist. Throughout college I went walletless, shoving loose bills in my back pockets and carrying only my ID card. Once, I made a make-shift duct-tape “cardholder” that held only my debit card and ID.
By the time I inherited his wallet, at the age of 23, that angst had faded. During college and his death I met my father again, and we bonded. Yes, a touching lighthearted story for the fam: when I took the wallet, it was an acceptance of everything he is in me. It was emblematic as the penultimate point our relationship had struggled to reach. It took his death to be given that realization. Today, I don’t carry it to prove loyalty or honor: I carry it because it is mine. It is my personal consubstantiation.
Since his death I have wondered if every time I have read his notes he was rolling in his grave; or whether or not his spirit was summoned. If his possessions invoke his personality (which is the very reason we keep personal items), doesn’t his personality, to some extent, induce his spirit? Of course, he was (and people are) more than his possessions, yet they provoked memories within me, that, if nothing else, summoned his spiritual content. Is there anything worse than provoking the dead? How can my father ever rest in peace if I can’t let his memories be buried with him? Certainly my father continues to live within me; he is one-half of me and to live forward, now, is to best commemorate his life, no? He gave me life to succeed and live, not to wallow in memories of his life. If I am to pay my respect to him, I must let him “go gentle into the good night.”
With certain possessions we can construct a timeline; footprints of dates and activities through time; reenact moments of their lives that we were not given witness to. It is more than an archaeological record because we know the person by whom the possessions were kept. Illusory: I am there with him, picturing him standing in line at the post office, waiting to mail the package in his hands, the address in his clumsy all caps handwriting, a cane in his right hand, and as the receipt shows, purchasing a money order; he is muttering under his breath; he is nervous to be there and doesn’t want to talk to the man standing behind the counter. Oddly, those are activities I normally dread in my life, but his death changed those feelings and suddenly those insignificant trivialities became very important, perhaps necessary. With it, I am able to better understand my father. Unknowingly, we hope that these possessions will give us an answer, or at least a clue, anything to ease the suffering. Can an object really give us an answer?
What I am guilty of, as are most Americans, is taking a possession, whether it is a family heirloom or article of clothing, and holding onto it for as long as I can. We all grieve in our own way. Observant Jews mourn for a year (following strict rules of dress, diet, and customs) and then mourning is over. It is considered almost sacrilegious to continue mourning. In many Buddhist countries, they mourn for 49 days and then only on the anniversary for seven years afterwards. Perhaps Americans can, eventually, when we are able to see through the materialistic understanding of others and ourselves, be able to devise a better way to mourn. For now, we will sip our brewing sadness cautiously, and take it one sip at a time. The American tradition reveals some of its roots. Thus it continues.
One of the ways Americans mourn is by having a funeral and having a burial or spreading of the ashes. And generally, if someone is buried, he or she is commemorated by a tombstone, or if someone is cremated, then he or she is remembered by the urn. When my father died, I couldn’t afford a tombstone. For $600, a nameplate could be placed into the ground. Oddly, six months after his death, a nameplate appeared mysteriously, by an anonymous donor.
When Americans cannot give their deceased a proper burial, it can mean travesty. Just think of all those who grieve for P.O.Ws./M.I.As. This tradition runs deep. And interestingly, this might be a clue to why Americans mourn with possessions.
During the Civil War, when so many of America’s sons died alone on the war field, which resulted in sending consoling letters home to the bereft as a testament of identity, families began cherishing anything significant in the absence of their loved one’s body. As Drew Gilpin Faust explains in her book, This Republic of Suffering, American citizens hoped that everyone had the “Good Death.” In summary, it was to die in your home surrounded by family and to make peace with your sins and repent so that everyone knew that you died in peace (and so that they knew they could meet you again in heaven). But with soldiers dying in war, families could not know how their sons died. Often the soldiers themselves wrote farewell letters before dying (many deaths were slow; most deaths were began with infection), or if they could not, their friends would send home a letter addressing, mostly, the deceased’s composition (during or after death) and any last words or thoughts given by the dying. The families were left with a short letter and maybe an article of clothing or a personal possession. Civil War families, uncertain of their child’s ascension to heaven, might mourn an entire lifetime. It is certainly possible that because Civil War era families were quite accustomed to death (due to high birth mortality rates, shorter lives, no penicillin, etc.), they didn’t mourn for an entire lifetime. However, that most people died at home, war death, being aberrant, caused families to mourn in a different way.
How would I have mourned had my father died in a secluded jungle in the Amazon (having cut off all ties with the world, etc.)? Would he have had a more peaceful death? Would his memory have faded sooner so that his name would disappear into oblivion? Would I have been able to deal with his death any better? Could I accept his death more easily?
A good friend of mine once told me that she would never stop missing her father. He had died ten years earlier. My first thought was, ‘Come on, you can’t be serious?’ And my subsequent thought was, ‘I’ll never do that.’ Since the death of my father was still fresh, I felt masculine bravado at my own emotions: I was still tender in dealing with them and believed that I had gone through the grieving. However, I was still in shock of his death, or perhaps had gone through anger and sorrow and come back around to shock. My emotions felt cyclical, as they are wont to do.
At the time, I had mistaken her word ‘missing’ for ‘mourning.’ Yes, I had put my foot in my mouth, but weren’t my remarks somewhat legitimate? Given the evidence (a picture of him at her computer, and I believe wearing a bracelet from him), my confusion is not entirely out of line. My line of sight saw possessions as acts of mourning, and I certainly didn’t want to be mourning for ten years. I didn’t want to revolve around grief. Yet, I reiterate, her complexity of emotional strings, which I could not understand, were delicate flashes of longing; it wasn’t the inner turmoil I had been feeling at that moment.
The rest of America, myself included, is right beside her. The possessions we keep are emblems of the body. Whether or not these help or retard the process of mourning is the question at hand. Or is the more immediate question, “Are these possessions necessary for mourning?” I would argue that as long as it doesn’t prolong our sorrow, it is necessary.
The morning my father died I called out of work at the hotel, but later that evening I reported to work at the Chinese restaurant. I pretended to be fine, as if I nothing happened. This is a trend that plagues Americans; the inability to face our emotions in their rawest forms. We will find something else to occupy our time so that we won’t have to deal with their immediacy, vain about their true nature; that they are always raw until you deal with them, until you handle them and understand them. I was one of those people who ignored my feelings, and I acted like I wasn’t. After three years passed, I realized that by neglecting my emotions they got buried and separated and became foreign.
The death of a loved one is the articulation of your life with the person; how he or she filled your life. What did my father mean to me while he was alive? What have I lost? How do I deal and perceive the void that has be given? Just like any relationship, the further it recedes into memory, it fades. The longer I didn’t confront his death, the more it grew ensnared with multitudes of other emotions; muscle insulated by fat. The intrusion was a source of embitterment and further estrangement of my own emotions. When they reemerged (after some serious writing about the topic), they were distant cousins, or worse, strangers to me. Strangers to whom we sometimes say, “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” But like a stranger, an emotion is a breathing, living, organic being with a heart of its own; often netted in the cobwebs of our closets; intertwined like one wiki page to the forty others nested within it.
The Internet has yet to last an entire generation, and why it shouldn’t is prophecy. Yet, as the Information Age matures, as the Internet becomes better organized and more easily searchable, as personal information becomes digitized, it will change how we remember. History is no longer exclusively for paper or our memories. Our lives, which include our history, have been interpolated by the digital world. Websites that are dedicated to the deceased alone mark a pioneering of eternal remembrance; drifting serenely and forever frozen like a stuffed animal through the echelons of each succeeding generation (see http://www.mydeathspace.com). Websites can be permanent memorials with photos and commentaries from friends and family. Not only does the Internet externalize death, it also follows the evolution of the effect of death; friends share their emotions publicly and engage in grieving together. Family members report ‘John would have been 35 today!’ and may write an aside that he is missed. In a twist of things, it fills the void left be the departed.
Although a website maintains such a dynamic record, what does it mean for our presently encroaching deaths? Does it help us accept our own anymore than we used to? And can we get over someone whose history remains so fluid and alive? Or is this the new way Americans mourn someone? Instead of a small, private circle of people having the only access to the deceased’s life, everyone can now “share a life.” We will always have feelings attached to those we’ve shared our life with: at the very least we’ve given them a part of us and when they die, as the cliché goes, a part of us dies too. Perhaps our digital gravestones are erected to mourn the small part of us that has died.
Even if critics believe that these electronic memorials are pathetic and invoke partial and incomplete persons, incomplete because in death people write only the niceties, no back stabbing so to speak, we must give them a moment in our lives. For we too, although fighting to live meaningful lives, deal with our encroaching death. We too wish to live for as long as we can, and in death, to be remembered for something more than a grotesque being. We are not here to make enemies: we want to rejoice, in the light of family and friends and goodness and God and such. My father never wanted an open casket funeral; he didn’t want to be ‘gawked’ at. But we gave him one because in spite of his voiced words, we knew that his friends and family needed to see him. Just so that when we knelt and said our prayers, we could see him. In that sense, it was as if he was watching us. And in that sense, provoking that spirit every now and again, with our possession, we are being watched, heard, and loved.
My mourning has passed; I continue to miss him from time to time: I knew he had tripped walking down the stairs and had a minor heart attack. When the paramedics arrived, he was D.O.A. I remember as he lay resting still in the hospital bed. He looked as if he’d been sleeping, but the lack of breath confused my immediate intuition. It seemed a hoax, and I wanted to see a deep breath of air go into his lungs. He looked pale, but he was still warm to the touch. I was oblivious to any questions or concerns. In my mind, a door had slammed, forced shut by a passing cool breeze, taking the hot air from one room, and pulling it into another. I spoke to him and cried. I loved him more than before; another door had opened. I didn’t want it, but it was there. I struggled to understand my own position; I wondered how long the feelings would last. I’ve decided to write a letter and tell him about it.
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