Do you believe in ghosts?
Do spirits walk the earth? What happens after death? Will you drift? Explore the stars? Heaven? Hell? Reincarnation? Or is it simply just over? Poof - done - dirt - dark - dust - ashes - nothing?
When you were a child, did you sit up late, and tell ghost stories, holding hands with your friends, calling to the dead? Did anyone answer?
In a graveyard, in the French Quarter of New Orleans, there is a crypt, not far from the grave of Marie Laveau, with a door knocker on its door. If you knock, will someone answer? Would you want them to?
We, the Herenow, ponder the Hereafter. Volumes have been written. Speculation. Trash — all of it. The living do not know death. To know death one must die, and to truly die one must pass a point of no return. There is the rub. The living can never know, only imagine. Put down your prayer books. Hang up on your psychics and mystics. Charlatans, all of them. The living know nothing of death.
You have heard tales, I am sure, Halloweenish ghastly goolish tales; campfire-fables of the evil, the lost, the tormented: the soldier looking for lost limbs: the widow in search of her husband: the flighty naughty horrid lost souls of thunder-night-dreams. Plagued souls, all. The tormented graveyard wanderer. The church stalker in midsummer-night’s-mist. A woman in flowing white dress under southern-moss-oak. Her lover there hanged and still hangs he when morning-mist comes creep-crawling, slithering. Of headless horsemen. A figure in attic window high. The phone call from a lost loved one moments after they die. The wisp of fog in a photograph. Voices in background recorded. The ghost hunters. The psychic’s spooky nonsense-words on the afterlife to come.
The living know nothing of death.
With due respect to Mr. Webster, I rewrite a definition found in his Dictionary.
Webster’s definition of DEATH: 1. The end of life 2. The loss of life 3. Extinction.
Should instead read: DEATH: 1. A separation of spirit from body. 2. Beforelife shed, Afterlife begins.