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Thoughts I’m having while drinking tea tonight…

Why do I talk about death so much?

Well… the most significant people in my life up to a point all passed away in the span of a few years, and all unexpectedly. No long illness or time to prepare. One day life is normal and the next day it’s shifted. Parallel. Other.

And they weren’t just significant in my eyes. They were cool people. Good folks. Strangers used to talk to me about my grandparents, my dad. Tell them hello for me, they’d say, or ‘I remember when’.  Now the people who knew them are dying too. The ones who shared dinners or saw them at church or remembered when. They are all leaving. So what happens if I don’t talk about my loved ones, don’t say their names, tell their stories? 

Some kind of metaphysical black hole, I think. I don’t want to find out.

When I talk about death I’m talking about the people I could point to, as a way to explain myself, as a map to who I am and how I got to be. They gave my life meaning, and me a sense of belonging. Now, I don’t have that, and I find myself grappling at the frayed edges of a faded papyrus chart, tracing my fingertips over ever-fainter sketches of a land that it seems only I have been to, trying to convince others that it does exist. It did exist. I’ve seen it. I was there.

I can never go back home, you see? Home has been buried, and cremated, and scattered out to sea. It was wonderful, and warm, and safe, and real. All I have left of all I have loved is a memory that feels like I dreamed it, made it up. Because no one else has seen it, or remembers it, or cares.

So I talk about it, to remind myself. To steady my heart, to try to re-orient myself with a world without them, without home. To remind others. I came from somewhere, even if that place is no longer. I remember it. It did exist. We were there.