Living Among the Dead

There is another world, but it is in this one. Paul Eluard First there were those who died before I was born. It was as if they had just left and their shadows would slip out after them under the door so recently closed the air in its path was still swirling to rest. Some of the furniture came from them, I was told, and one day I opened two chests of drawers to learn what the dead kept. But it was when I learned to read that I began always to live among the dead. I remember Rapunzel, the improved animals in the Just-So Stories, and a flock of birds that saved themselves from a hunter by flying in place in the shape of a tree, their wings imitating the whisk of wind in the leaves. My sons and I are like some wine the dead have already bottled. They wish us well, but there is nothing they can do for us. Sebastian cries in his sleep, I bring him into my bed, talk to him, rub his back. To help his sons live easily among the dead is a father’s great work. Now Sebastian drifts, soon he’ll sleep. We can almost hear the dead breathing. They sound like water under a ship at sea. To love the dead is easy. They are final, perfect. But to love a child is sometimes to fail at love while the dead look on with their abstract sorrow. To love a child is to turn away from the patient dead. It is to sleep carefully in case he cries. Later, when my sons are grown among their own dead, I can dive easily into sleep and loll among the coral of my dreams growing on themselves until at the end I almost never dream of anyone, except my sons, who is still alive.