Dia de los Muertos

For Joseph Henry Piecuch, 1979-2014

People can live in your mind–nourished, lively, protected from violent forces like time, distance, and reason. They bolster an assortment of ideas: Hope, love, fate. Woven to these forces and ideas, they become one, powerful and purposeful, an extension of yourself. And in return, they are loved. Not the love that requires existence in the physical world, but an intrinsic, omnipotent love. Like loving yourself.

But they’re not really in your life, I persuade myself. It’s kid stuff, the romanticized unrequited love that everyone of my favorite songs are about. Not real. Fantasy. Yes, of course. This part of me is correct. But there is this other part that knows other things, as sure day. This other part… that people can live in your mind.

So why was this any different: death? Why couldn’t it be the same as it was, with the whole time and distance and reason thing not a factor anyway. Couldn’t it continue existing in isolation, in my mind, beckoned outward on occasion like an undulating, mystical snake finding its way out of a woven basket. Provoked by song, shared memory of song.

But it’s death. Definitive in the way time, distance and reason is not.

But death also preserves, in a way,

while life gives way.