Conversation with a Ghost

Dear Dave,

You, more than anyone, might find it strange that I write to you on Valentine's Day. You might even be amused.

I was frightened by your conviction that death is the end of everything, and amazed by your equanimity. You said it was simply the nature of things —  to come into being, to age, to die — and you wouldn't want to live in a world without death. You thought something would be missing, a lack of drive to morality, perhaps, or insufficient passion to do what we believe we're here to do.

Yet you did everything your medical training suggested could keep you alive and in good health, paying rigorous attention to what you ate, playing racquetball, as though your body protested your concept of death and feared you would, as you did, die young.

We'd been divorced more than fifteen years when Dylan called to say you'd had a heart attack. I thought of you by then as an occasional friend or interested party when issues with the children arose. So I was surprised how much I grieved.

John Updike died recently and I wept over his death, too, even though — of course — I didn't know him. Through these many years I continued to read Updike's own progress through life, his fiction drawing, I felt sure, from experiences much like mine.

The phrase from one of his Rabbit books I remember most clearly is this: "In a hundred years we'll all be grass."

If that's what you have become, Dave, I see you as reed grass, tall, lean, somewhat spare.

Love, Mary