I’ve spent a lot of time lately sitting around with ghosts. Generally, I find that ghosts make the best conversationalists when it comes to discussing death, because the living don’t really care to have that dialogue. I, however, don’t have that problem. I have absolutely no concern or fear of my death, because of what I believe happens when we die and because of the way that I attempt (often poorly, by my own standards) to live my life. So lately, I’ve been sitting around with the ghosts of some old friends and important family members chatting about the possibilities.

From the time life started, I read, and once I could read words, I wanted to write. I remember writing and drawing my own illustrations. In elementary school, for “career day,” I created a diorama out of a shoebox that depicted me, at a typewriter, in a room surrounded by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. I was alone at the typewriter (oh, my God – did I just remember that I had added a pet? A cat? Did my mother ask me why I had a cat in there with me?) and the room was my library. I was, of course, writing.

A few years after that, in another school, in another town, at another “career day,” the writer of Friendly Fire (a book that was big in the 70s/80s but appears to be out-of-print; I’m officially old) came to talk to us about how difficult it was to be a writer. I was painfully shy at twelve, and I sat in rapt adoration at having a real, live, published author sitting in our classroom talking to us about writing. I was too scared to ask questions during the Q/A session, so I waited and approached him as everyone filed from the room. I asked him how one becomes a writer. He looked at me and told me to find another profession. I remember slowly leaving that room and walking down the middle school hallway feeling like my life had ended. How could a writer tell another writer that? 

Although I didn’t pursue a career in writing, I continued to write all through high school into college. My college applications contained articles I wrote for the local papers and my fiction and poetry. I worked in a bookstore in college. In both high school and college, I participated in workshops, lectures, roundtables, and forums. I submitted work and suffered rejection. When I left college, I got a job that had nothing to do with journalism or writing. I stopped writing with discipline. I moved away from the image in the diorama. It receded from my mind, fading from memory as lots of things tend to do.

But back to death. I don’t imagine death as the Grim Reaper, tall, dark, and sinister. I think of him as an efficiency expert. Death is clean and neat and very organized. Everything is simple. Human beings make it complicated and messy. Death has hospital corners and precision. It knows things we don’t. I always imagine us all in this large, pristinely white airport, carrying nothing and standing perfectly still on those eerie yet serene moving walkways, in the quiet, as we slowly migrate toward the same destination. It may appear we are moving in different directions, but in the end, it’s actually all the same. We just take different routes to get there, and depending, some arrive earlier than others.

Dawna Markova wrote:

I will not die an unlived life.
I will not live in fear
of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible,
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance;
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.

God, I love that poem. It’s more than a poem. It’s a song, a heartbeat, a throbbing life inside my skin. The words start and they don’t stop til the end, tumbling one after the next, like cool water bubbling and flowing down from the mountain. It’s effortless. It makes sense. It’s simply and eloquently what it is.

So, maybe in the end, it’s not so much about who we are but about what we do. What we give, what we become. With what and with whom we connect. Where we travel and what imprints we leave when we follow a path or blaze a trail. In whom we trust and confide, and the lives that we enrich with ours, expecting nothing in return. The generosity with which we meet needs. The forgiveness we give, when we are capable.

Maybe it’s about whether or not we grace the world with love and compassion or fill it with fear and hatred. Whether or not we reach out or close our hands to those around us.

Maybe it’s about the light we shine.