On SLOG…  Charles Mudede hits me where I am still pretty raw…  Where I guess it will always hurt…

This morning, around James and 5th, a woman across the street waves at me. She is around 50, black, and wearing a tracksuit. I think it is my mother. She is on her morning walk; she is waving at her son. But a closer look reveals the waving person to be not my mother but a crackhead who has mistaken me for a crackhead or dealer. I look away from her and walk up the hill.

But to slip by a trick of light and colors into that split second was something wonderful. In that split second I believed that my dead mother was alive and out and about. She was in the world with her own body. The thing about a death is that it finishes not so much the person but the relationship with that person. Instead of the subject object relationship, there is now only a subject—you who survives. The death of a close person is the total internalization of that person. Your living body becomes the site of their burial. It is here inside that the dead have something like an afterlife (alive but not alive, in time but not in time). They roam the body like a ghost roams a tomb.

Mom…  Dad…  My favorite uncle who I didn’t get nearly enough time with…  All the friends who are missing now…  It’s not the certainty of my own death that I hate.  Death doesn’t come like a thief in the night and take you away in the twinkling of an eye.  It kills you slowly…a little bit more and a little bit more every time it takes someone away from you.  Ghosts are the phantom limbs of the part of you that exists in a friend’s smile or a parent’s embrace, that your subconscious mind keeps insisting must still be there.   I could name them all.  Sometimes I still see them walking by on the street.  Then I realize it was just a chance resemblance in a walk, or a gesture, or a smile.  And it hurts all over again.