This is the season when we dream on resurrection. We think of those who are gone and wish them with us if only for a meal or conversation .. or for one night. If they are far enough away in time, our memory begins to lose them — their voices, especially, but the quicksilver, mercurial wonder of them, the ways that the smallest shifts in their posture or expression made us alert to their inner lives — that is one of the losses, and the often silent give and take between us and them, and the comfort of knowing that nothing could shake our ease in their presence, and, and, and …. When we see videos of them taken at gatherings barely recalled, something snaps back, an emotional charge that slowly winds its way along the fuse and sometimes detonates. Our imaginations never stop bringing them back to us — ghost images, transparent as mist, wavering into view at the grocery store, or while we are walking the road at dusk or climbing the stairs at night.
That desire to see them again, to catch the electric flow of their company, leads me to a recommendation. Find a way to watch They Shall Not Grow Old.
It has nothing to do with those we know, it has nothing to do with our losses, with those spirit-visitors who are personal to us, but I’ll bet it does capture the reverence we give to the dead and the delight of watching them walk again, and laugh, and remind us of the deep past and the humanity of all those who came before us.
