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I guess that one reason why people love ghost stories is that if there are ghosts, our loved ones are not lost. Something, even something evanescent, lingers, we don’t really have to say good-bye, ever. Plus, if the ghost lingers nearby somehow, then when I pass, or die or whatever people call their own death, I, too will linger on. “Music, when soft voices die,” Shelley wrote, “vibrates in the memory.” Even just that, even just that one vibration.
Or, nothing.
As much as poets and artists and spiritual leaders and scientists try to talk it up, nothing is a hard pill to swallow.
The awesomeness and scale of such a thing is imponderable, for one. Darker than dark, further than far and something worse than silence, the one thing I fear the most – Absence.
(Not that I in any way prefer notions of Disney plus heaven, where Ron and Nancy Reagan are reunited, Elvis and Tupac sample each other on the daily, every single dog who has ever existed is running around like in Lima and where the only music is “You Light Up My Life” by Debby Boone on a loop.)
There is a heaven in between. I know there is. Someplace less lonely, perhaps, someplace like here, only with all the right ghosts about.