Today is a day of ghosts

I woke from a dream of lost love, someone who died many years ago. These dreams have their compensations. In a world where everyone who dies goes before I’m finished with them, a brief reappearance in this form comforts me and reminds me that Reality is only palely mocked by my Platonic shadows.

But I have come to be wary of days that start so well.

My understanding is too imperfect for much overlap with the Sublime. The uneven Zen of an ordinary day meshes poorly with my complicated relationship with the eternal. I am torn between my need to consider issues essential and large and the possible arrival of a badly needed plumber. I suppose one of the hallmarks of the enlightened is the ability to balance these things with grace, although a complete indifference to clogged pipes might be another way to go.

On a day like this, I’d like to curl up with a mound of books and consider these options, but I suspect that’s neither enlightened nor wise. I don’t believe I’ll be able to happen upon a recognized authority who endorses such self-indulgence. Even Hitchhikers have a towel.

Which brings me, however obliquely, to news I heard yesterday. A friend of mine, a neighbor, has been diagnosed with dementia. The very idea fills me with sadness and terror.

This would not be the first person I know whose mind has eroded this way. A favorite teacher of mine had his tide come in too soon. A parent from my youth lost many brain cells to a heart attack, and now lacks the acuity that characterised him for so long. And a brilliant man, a cryptographer during the Second World War, lost his wife and took his secrets into an increasingly pleasant-natured world, where he was the bane of the Alzheimer’s facility for his complete indifference to their complicated locks. When he felt like leaving, he left.

This is my first time, however, charting this journey with a peer.

I said above that my understanding is imperfect. Nowhere is that more clearly displayed than in challenges to my reliance on it. However I recognize the importance of faith, I still stand with Helen Keller, who wanted, “Not the peace which passes understanding, but the understanding which bringeth peace.” Here we all are in the Garden of Gethsemane.

It is my terror that the connections I have built to this world dissolve. Even having been told that I must lose this world to gain another, I cling to my tiny souvenirs of oneness rather than empty my hands. My attachment to the dead is unresigned, my attachment to the living likewise unfinished. I am in process. If there is an Enlightenment that requires detachment, it is not yet for me, because I am fiercely, passionately, unrepentantly attached to a beautiful world, stopped sink and all.

I am committed to my ghosts.