who was this person?
a student of mine for class chose to imagine a future chapter
in which the characters of the book we just experienced
remember and express people and joy and tragedy
that life threw at them in the novel,
her description of the cemetery, the tombstone,
the difficult memories, all brought up by the next generation's
innocent question of who was this person?
real tears welled in my eyes
as she touched a reality I often live,
for I live while others, about whom I deeply care, don't,
why go to a cemetery?
one answer I got from an older person yeas ago:
"because that's where all my friends are,"
every time I stand at a grave,
I strive to remember the spirit
that flashed in their eyes, in their life,
in the grand effort to be who they were,
to be at their best,
despite the short-circuiting that plagues us all,
I marvel at how well each could be who they were,
I still feel diminished by each loss to our current selves,
I am both gifted and plagued
by flashes of the fullness of the lives each lived,
and how each lives for us now but in memory.
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