How real can they be if the dead are gone, or lost, or in the past tense? Dying people intuitively begin to understand that their reality is pending, that their citizenship in the land of the living is tenuous and ebbing, that they are even now beginning to join that faceless, nameless caravan of the Lost and the Gone, heading out of town. They can feel it in the strained etiquette of conversations about how they are faring. They see that the living have already made for them a separate place, emotionally and spiritually, to live out their days. They are, with the shadow of their dying upon
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