A Letter to the Dead

Death may be of the spirit, not the body.

From Masaccio’s “Holy Trinity” (c. 1426); the Latin may be rendered:“As you are, I was; as I am, you will be.”

But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled; my steps had nearly slipped... If I had said, “I will speak thus,” behold, I would have been untrue to the generation of Your children. When I thought how to understand this, it was too painful for me—

A letter to the dead.

           If we might tender but one letter for the dead, what might that letter be? Alpha, to imply Omega, to feed our theism? Bravo, to acknowledge that all life is a comedy played out upon a stage? Delta, for after all, the only constant is change? Foxtrot, remembering the joy and play of mortal life, its resemblance to dance? Juliet—

A letter to the dead.

           I rejoice in resurrection. There. A solid, weighty sentence. Unambiguous subject, active indicative verb, germane direct object. Let us do away with the flighty passive voice, subjunctive sophistry, dangling participles, implied objects, etc. Let us speak and reason with concrete rhetoric—with the solidity and rapidity of incarnated immortals—and let us rejoice therein. Let us rejoice in our identities, for we are not so unalike.

           The sleep in which you bathe shall not persist. It cannot. You shall wake, and your eyelids shall flicker, as the morning dew clings to your skin, the birds welcome the blazing sun, and all Earth is suffused with presence.

           Presence or presents? They sound the same. Maybe I mean both? I think both work. Roll those words, those twin fruits, over your tongue, and taste the simple syllables. When spoken aloud, those words are indistinguishable. That only makes sense if they are the same word. I think they are. Without the written word of language to prove otherwise, aren’t they?

A letter to the dead.

           The core of grief is regret. The blister of absence eventually meets the callus of perseverance; but regret can never be assuaged, can never be evaded, can never be satisfied. Regret leverages man’s mightiest, divinest power against him: imagination. That same limitless force which divorces man from his animal neighbors remains just as limitless and forceful when channeled into the violence of regret. For regret is a sort of violence: it is a violence against the conscience. It crucifies the strained, finite decisions of the past upon a cross of perfect knowledge, and knowledge only finds perfection in the perfect tense—never in the present tense.

A letter to the dead.

           You are missed. Your absence urges towards a disinclination to exist anywhere but the future tense. Yet all the fastidious grammar in the world is powerless to soften the crackling electricity of loss. Some say that loss numbs, but it numbs by overstimulation. The nerves fail.