I See Dead People

No, not really, not in the sense of ghosts or spectres.

What I see, in my mind and memory, are images of people past, those I knew personally who have moved on to the unknown realm. Starting with my first friend Bobby, who I knew in my preschool age years and who died a few years later of cancer. He's always around, in those vague and early memories of discovering life and the world.

My best childhood friend's sister, Suzanne, who died during high school when the car she was riding in, with a boy her parents had warned her about, when that car tried to race a train to a crossing, and lost. A high school classmate I barely knew, who graduated a year before me and died in Vietnam.

JoAnn, a girl I knew and hung out with during my college years, who I dubbed my "mere tad." We shared a tumult of feelings, and we never got past my resentment when she happily told me about her engagement. She later died, I read, also of cancer, after a long and I think happy marriage; she'd been a history major and her obit talked about her never-ending love of history. Now she's part of it.

I worked several years for the judicial system, both federal and state, as a law clerk to particular judges. I vividly recall talking with them of everything from law to family, laughing and stressing and doing the things people do in intense working relationships. Federal judge R., already in his 90s, asked me to write a eulogy for a judge friend of his who had died. So I did. A couple years later I wrote a eulogy for him and helped the newspaper reporter write the obit -- three years later I read that newspaper guy's obit. And I later wrote another eulogy for federal judge C.

All gone now.

Then there are family members, especially the older generation. Of my parents and uncles and aunts, only my mother remains alive, at 94. I recall the passing of one of my father's brothers, and my parents' quiet conversations about it, when I was myself a mere tad. And of course my father, fascinated by the idea of spirits and haunted houses, more than 20 years ago now died of a sudden heart attack and now, perhaps, has some of the answers to some of his questions. One by one they went, suddenly or slowly, into an unknown that used to seem so fantastic, in the mystery sense of the world, but now begins to seem simply inevitable. When my mother goes, I and my sister and brother and cousins will be the "older generation" to be tolerated and accepted and perhaps wondered at and maybe even pitied sometimes.

Anyway, they are all gone now, and so many memories rise up and slip back.

When one is young and healthy it's easy to presume that death is somehow a failure of living, or a bad break, or something that happens to someone else. And as other people die but we stay alive, we get an inevitable sense of immortality. We get to sit back and watch and comment and wonder, as people who were once vibrant and alive cross over. We go to funerals and listen as the bell tolls, maybe intellectually understanding but not really accepting, that one day the bell will toll for us.

I no longer have that luxury; as the saying goes, it's not the end of my life but I can see it from here. I recall my father saying, with fascination, that he had reached his promised "three score and ten," and all he had left was bonus time, a bonus that turned out to be eight years. I'm two years from reaching my own three-score and ten.

When I was younger I too had a great appreciation for ghost stories. Usually those ghosts were unhappy spirits of people who had some unfinished business, but almost inevitably those were spirits of people who had led strong and, if not virtuous, at least accomplished lives. Where does my 10-year-old friend Bobby fit into that, or my Aunt H., who I loved dearly but, to the best of my knowledge, had no sort of powerful presence or even especially deep thoughts; yet both of them have passed over, too, and experienced whatever it is that lies there, which must be fantastical or mysterious. Or, I guess, maybe nothing.

All of which leaves me with a renewed interest in the religious and spiritual realm. When one accepts that everything logical and solid and demonstrably true is, in fact, ephemeral and illusory, the need for something deeper becomes clear. And to find that one must let go of the known and find. . . . And find what? To the best of my knowledge no one has ever come back and told me what that unknown future holds (I know that my Christian friends will say Jesus did, but even He has never talked to me). I have to look into my heart and poke around in the deeper recesses of my awareness and subconscious, always mindful that what I find may be mistaken, or wishful thinking, or even malignant misadvice.

At least for now, the Tao te Ching offers one appealing perspective:

"Knowing constancy, the mind is open.
With an open mind, you will be open-hearted.
Being open-hearted, you will act royally.
Being royal, you will attain the divine.
Being divine, you will be at one with the Tao.
Being at one with the Tao is eternal.
And though the body dies, the Tao will never pass away."

Ch. 16

As I close this, I sense some of those dead people pushing into my consciousness, and I'm glad to see them. At least sort of. For now anyway.