I had become disillusioned, which is no easier to overcome than grief. It is grief, in fact—not for the death of a loved one but for the death of a vibrant ideal. I believed that death would have something to teach me, that I would be enlightened by it rather than impoverished. “I grieve that grief can teach me nothing,” Emerson wrote at the sudden death of his beloved son, Waldo, age five—a much harder loss, no doubt, than that of some old dad, but the remark sums up my own experience. When Charlie died, I grew no closer to the astral plane, gleaned no hint of the beyond. The dying breathe
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