I wouldn’t know my father if he bumped into me on the street. Of course he’s been dead for forty years so the prospect of that actually happening is probably fairly slim. My mother on the other hand I would probably recognize, but I would initially think she looked like somebody else, an old movie actor perhaps, or an author whose picture I saw on the back cover of a book.
The thing is, no matter how much we may have loved, or perhaps even still love, these people, their memories fade.
There is a picture of my father in a round gold frame in my house in which he is sitting on steps, or a bench, or the bottom of a bleacher. His elbows rest on his knees, his hands hanging limply from his wrists. His back is arched and his gaze is focused on someone or something not in the picture. His hair is white, his shirt collar opened at the neck, It is spring, or summer.
I pass that picture at least once a day and once I day I ask myself, “Who is that man?”
My mother is less of a problem for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that I actually knew my mother, not so my father, and see her in the face of my sister Pam. Indeed Pam is so much the apparent reincarnation of my mother that I sometimes have to stop myself from asking her what it’s like on the other side. Well, I guess that’s not really true, or not completely anyway. I’m never really tempted to ask if I have anything to look forward to or fear when I am sent on my merry way, but I am sometimes taken aback at how much my sister Pam does look like my mother.
It’s a funny thing I guess, funny in the way rocks are not, but what if the memories we have of the dearly departed are all that keeps their afterlife going, like fuel for a car. What if, as time passes, and our memories of them fade, they feel their substance (whatever that substance might be) dissipating, like a breath of air on a cold day?
I don’t know what this would mean, really. Maybe it would simply be a way to make room for new arrivals in the after life. Maybe that place, like this one, suffers, on occasion, from overpopulation. Maybe those who are brought back from apparent death, couldn’t cross over for the simple reason that there was no room, just yet, on the other side.
Of course this brings up an intriguing possibility. If we can’t move from here to there if there is no room there, and if there is no room there because memories are still strong here, the very proliferation of pictures and videos brought about because of digital technology may very well be our ticket to a very long life, and maybe even immortality.
