spirited away

She's still with us, still with us in spirit. Despite the fact that their bus went off a cliff, I know those school kids are still playing hopscotch somewhere. That disease or the mainstream media may have ravaged his mind but they couldn't take away his soul, he's still looking out for us, etc.

When this sort of jazz gets said (always at funerals, always everyone at their most open and sorrowful and needing) it sounds to my heart like a well meaning but ultimately ineffective or inaccurate salve, a kind of polite quack remedy. Deep down (particularly if those saying it aren't terribly religious, or ascribe little in a concept of afterlife) you can tell that very often the people saying it don't mean it themselves. The caring piece, of people looking out for each other in low moments, in moments when the shared script of trying and reward is most questioned, comes across, and helps. But that shared lie also strikes a hollow and deflating chord, just when that certainty that nothing is ever really created ex nihilis and therefore nothing ever really returns to it would help the most.

I'm not sure why I'm so rooted in skepticism at those moments, though. Because there are times that the people we love who've passed away are as close as ever. Times I can feel the spirits of our ancestors keeping careful watch, including people I'm sure we've never met, and including too the people that we miss the most. It's something felt and intuited; something I know to be as real as anything else I know. Something known in the way a melody comes to mind on a sad day, to let me know everything will be okay; in the way that for the most part things hold together in our shared lives, that more times than not it seems like someone has sprinkled good luck to hold the stray, errant, or potentially fatal pieces in place, to stave off full disaster for another day.

The world has more magic than we'll ever know, but certainly less than we need it to, on a given day. This skeptic/dualist balance-- knowing deep down and full well that one of two things that I know for sure absolutely can't be true, and still believing both on an as needed basis-- feels rather grown up and rather primitive all at once.