I See You've Called in Dead

by John Kenney

I felt as if I were in junior high, at a dance, the long walk over to a girl—Beth Creehan, in my case—to ask her to dance. (Beth said no and then I had the four-hundred-mile walk back, my friends laughing. Fortunately, these memories don’t stay with you longer than seventy or eighty years.)

We should be required to take flight from time to time, to see anew, to see how small and fragile we are.

“We hold the past in our body,” she said. “It never forgets. But it can learn to let it go.”

Our lives each day are a series of choices. It’s one decision over another. One person over another. One job in a new city over staying at the old job. Whole worlds of what-ifs.

What death dares us to do, is celebrate it. To celebrate the gift of life in its fleeting face.”

Apparently red cardinals can be spiritual messengers. The word cardinal comes from the Latin word cardo, meaning hinge or axis. Like a door’s hinge, the cardinal is a kind of doorway between Earth and the spirit world, the story said.