I guess I half-believe that too. Partly because my visit with my vegetative mother last week has me feeling that it's only fair we should get some sort of final chance to say unsaid things, or at least ask what it's like in there — in The Beyond, or in my mom's head. If people who are gone can't talk it's only fair to assume that they can listen, right? So for this reason I believe it was Real Sean in Jessie's dreams, and I also believe it because of this, one of my favorite poems ever.
By Marie Howe, from "What the Living Do":
THE PROMISE
In the dream I had when he came back not sick
but whole, and wearing his winter coat,
he looked at me as though he couldn’t speak, as if
there were a law against it, a membrane he couldn’t break.
His silence was what he could not
not do, like our breathing in this world, like our living,
as we do, in time.
And I told him: I’m reading all this Buddhist stuff,
and listen, we don’t die when we die. Death is an event,
a threshold we pass though. We go on and on
and into light forever.
And he looked down, and then back up at me. It was the look we’d pass
across the kitchen when Dad was drunk again and dangerous,
the level look that wants to tell you something,
in a crowded room, something important, and can’t.
