SEPTEMBER 21
I don’t believe you dead. How can you be dead if I still feel
you? Maybe, like God, you changed into something different
that I’ll have to speak to in a different way, but you not dead
to me Nettie. And never will be. Sometimes when I get tired
of talking to myself I talk to you.
—ALICE WALKERIt is hard to believe—that a loved one has died.
And for a while we do feel his or her presence. This may
be more than our own projection. People tell of being aware
of just when the spirit of the dead takes leave of a room, of
silent exchanges, of visitations that follow soon after the
death of a loved one.
Whether these are real or imagined, we certainly continue
to think toward the dead, to carry on imagined conversations
with them. One mourner told of how healing it was for him
to go often to the cemetery and talk to his departed love.
It is a favored therapy, too, in healing unresolved hurts
and misunderstandings. “What would you say to her?”
“What do you imagine she might say back to you?”
Sometimes the veil between the living and the dead seems thin,
and lighter than air.