"Every Post is a Ghost"

 

A ghost is almost by definition unfinished business, a part of the past that refuses to stay passed; it is a memory that denies forgetting; it is guilt and grief and regret. It is hunger and loneliness and pathos, ‘crying remember me, remember me.’ It is death that will not stay buried; at its worst it is an envy that will seek to destroy the thing it cannot have; and if it cannot have it, will pull it into the grave for company. It is the refusal of finality, the denial of death, the unacceptance of eternity. It is mockery in the face of mortality. It is history enigmatically asking for something of us. It is the awe felt at the unknown backward abyss of time, at the space we have come to have mysteriously inherited from unguessed generations. As we are, it once was; as it is, we may yet be, and the thought, well, haunts us. A ghost is a metaphor that we learn almost before we even know what death is, an idea that becomes part of our living. They are mementoes mori, urging us to seize the day, to live life to the fullest while we can, to stop living a gray mechanical half-life, to step out of the shadows into the sun while it is still shining. Then, when it is time to rest, we can rest; with no guilt or grief or regret, no tragic tale left behind to haunt the living, no reason to be a ghost.