Every death is a beginning of the end of the beginning of the end. Or something like that; but there is no curiosity more powerful than the clues the dead leave behind as breadcrumb secrets of who they really were during their lives, along with all the curses left behind with the truths of their real, haunting, hidden, desires.
We, the living, are forced into the service of the shadows of the dead, to dig into the unwanted, the forgotten, and the unforgiven. We quickly discover the withholdings of a brokered life that are shattered open against all the hopes of the passed. Public truths forged as private lies are slyly revealed.
The weaponization of compartmentalization is often key to unraveling the mystery. Divide and separate. Tell everyone something, but never one person everything. That way, control is kept; desires are checked. Nobody has the full story. Only a reality-spun myth can be shared as gossip, perception, and relating.
In the corners of the night and hiding in the crevices of the abandonment, a sliver, a niche, of small truths are forced back alive like ghostly glass flasks recovered from a shipwreck. A curiosity that compels meaning.
It’s all there and it all becomes real. The donations. The esoteric splurges. The divine in the mundane. The old tax returns are the purest form of a rarest, radiant, truth that cannot be denied, even in death — the government demands to know! And so, all the numbers are there — sprawled out and bleeding — longing to be collected, paid back, sold, donated, gifted, or maybe even returned anew into something saved, as well as something earned.
We learn there is no hiding from death. It pinches each of us in our time. So the dead must hope to learn someone is always left behind to clean and reconstruct. There is no human salvation, or ethereal redemption, in the drudginess of an unearthed dying — only bits of the reality of the living matters now.
The unknown becomes spoken, and those who were forbidden to connect are now able to refine, and realize, in the brighter light of day, and commune in what had been lost, and abandoned, for 40 years in a forcible darkness.
Even a dimming sun may brightly shine against the dying of the day — and a hard truth sets in — as facts are revealed, and the vision of belonging, and understanding, all become alighted in magic hour chaos.
Understanding arrives in revelation. The forms and signatures are all left behind just to be crated, boxed, examined, and acted upon. And then forgotten.
Now we know everything.
In the loss is found the longing for understanding; and the matrix of a hidden, and complex life, becomes reasonable, and stinging, and ripe for the frame of context and analysis that could never be comprehended in the burlesque busking of the active life.
And so it all ends as it began: Emptiness becoming belonging, and loneliness anoints everything that could have been.
Oh, yes, and the dead only leave behind inescapableness.