Out of the corner of my eye

Have you ever had that experience where you think you see someone walk by, but then you look and no one is there? Or you think you see someone standing on the side of the road as you drive by, but when you look in your mirror, there wasn't anyone? Or maybe you mistook someone to be someone else when you don't look at them full on?

I've done that several times today, and just now, I experienced the most jarring one. I saw a person walk by my office door, and I just knew it was a certain student. But this student passed away last semester, so I shook my head a bit and realized it was someone else, just strolling by. I felt the shock of sadness that I felt last fall when I'd learned that this student was no longer with us, and I had to force myself to remember that it was Spring - a different season AND a different semester.

In class yesterday, we read a poem entitled "Nothing Is Lost." In it, the speaker discusses very reverentially the idea that nothing is lost over time - no person, no love, no meaning. In the first stanza of the poem, the speaker says that "It is not that the dead return--/They are about us always, though unguessed." I was reminded of that today, when I mistook one student for another - one who is gone, at least physically.

In the third and fourth stanzas, the poem explores the idea that in us lives the very DNA of every ancestor that came before us; we betray it in our freckles or the way we walk. I love this idea, and it's part of the reason why pursuing my genealogy is so important to me.

I don't know what I think about the dead - where they are, what they know, what they see or hear. Can they see us? Do they know what we're doing? Do they watch us? I can't decide if that would be a comforting thought or not. Perhaps it would be too much weight to bear - too much responsibility to "live up" to what the dead want from me. I have enough anxiety over living up to what I think the living expect from me.

But I do love the idea of my ancestors living on through me through what I've inherited from them. I'd love to be able to look back through time and see who I look like, who I sound like, who I walk like, who I think like. Certainly I'm not the only one who needs to question and reason everything! :)

Nothing is lost.