Carrying Your Ghost - Epilogue

Thirty pieces, two notebooks, and over a month of work later and I still couldn’t tell you what really started this all.  There were, of course, some seemingly unresolved personal issues and emotions that still needed an outlet.  I have to ask myself, though, why now?  That may be a question that is never answered, and in all honesty, I really am not that concerned about it.  What matters to me is the work itself.  I, in no way, make any assertions to the quality of it.  What matters to me is that every single word made it out of my pen and onto the pages of my notebooks.  If you have read these pieces, I hope that you at least found something that you could identify with, could understand, and maybe even something you could take with you.  That alone would make writing them worthwhile.

I would also like to say a few words about the subject.  His name was Alexander Eli Siers Jr., born October 10, 1975 and died November 16, 1993.  He was my friend and probably a better one to me than I was to him in life.  As would happen I made the classic friend mistake, I took for granted the amount of time that this life had given us and it ran out far too soon.  It is an easily avoidable mistake that it seems we all make too often.  I am still trying to make up for it.

While these pieces were written with Alex as the focus, they also represent a number of other lost souls, friends and loved ones taken before their time.  Where I come from and along the road that I have traveled, I’ve collected more ghosts than I would like.  And so these words are also dedicated to Twila, really just a baby, whose passing taught me what death was before I’d even had a chance to learn what life was; for Wanbli, whose life ended just as we were all struggling to find our way into our young adulthood; for Bill, one of the only decent cops I’ve ever met, trying to do the job in a place where that quality is all the more scarce; for a man we called Shadow, who was just getting back onto his feet when a hit and run driver knocked them out from under him for good; for Stormy, for Jewel, for the rest of those whose lives have ended all too abruptly and before their full measure.  These are the lives and endings that I am powerless to change.  So I do the only thing that I can, I pick up their ghosts and I carry them, I guess as long as I am able.  My prayer then is this, that when I have fallen, when I can carry them no more, that there will be someone there to pick us up, and carry us a little further.  In the end, it’s the only immortality that we can have in this world, the legacy that we leave in the lives and memories of others.

 

Thanks for reading,

 Zero  -08/29/2007