The Ghost of Cedar Lane

Death.

It’s never something you think much about, because you never think it will happen to you... until it does. Even today on Halloween, when people celebrate the dead, you don’t think about death at all. People dress up in their costumes, laughing, indulging in sensory pleasures. They feel more alive than they have reason to feel on most other days of the year; they forget the reason for it all. The meaning is lost to the void.

Even when people do imagine death, they go about it the wrong way, thinking of bloody, vengeful murderers; restless demons and eternal fires. No living person knows (or has the capacity to imagine) the emptiness of death as I know it, nor the cold, or even the fear. It’s one thing to dress up as a ghost on Halloween. It’s a different thing entirely to actually be dead.

Everything is empty when you’re dead. I’ve only been gone since April, but the vastness of the space I can enter without encountering a soul has already begun to take its toll on me. No harm can come of me, and yet I am still afraid. Nothing can hurt me, but I fear the darkness of night; the open, lurking vacuum just beyond the sky, more than I ever feared anything when I was alive. It gives me chills, though I have no body-- somehow, that makes it even worse. 

I haven’t spoken to another person, dead or alive, in six months. I come back to my home occasionally to watch life go on without me, but mostly I exist in unfamiliar space. Perhaps I’ve missed something, and every other departed soul has moved on to somewhere beyond here; somewhere past this shadow of the living world, a world with which I no longer interact.

I still remember the day I died. It was a windy spring day, with no rain for the first time in a week; Cedar Lane was slick with water that reflected the bright blue, cloudless sky. I remember the way my hair whipped across my cheeks, ragged and wild, as I stared upwards at the vast dome of the sky that seemed to expand forever. I felt… free. 

No one expects to die on a day like that. Well, no one expects to die. And when you do die, it’s not what you expect.

I didn’t meet God. I didn’t even see my life flash before my eyes. All I knew was that I had become one with the emptiness. I could see and hear, but I had slipped off some invisible ledge, and fallen beyond the reach of everyone who continued to live.

Somehow, that severed connection didn’t feel devastating. I had expected the pain--the crushing loss-- to crash through me like waves. As I watched the people I loved crying over the empty husk of my body, I imagined how the pain I should have felt must have been tumbling through their bodies--feeble and shaking with the impact-- in my stead.

I should have felt uprooted. I should have crumpled with the pain of being ripped so hideously from the body that had been fundamental to my existence only seconds earlier, the cold, stinging blood flowing out of the broken seams in rivers. But instead, I just felt a void. An emptiness from which I could not distinguish myself, as there was nothing left for me outside of it. I can no longer leave this void that I must assume is death. 

 I’ve always felt the most alone in the midst of a crowd; and to be dead, I think, is to exist in a crowd --where you are literally invisible rather than figuratively. I can see everything that I used to see in life, but I can do nothing, and feel nothing but this lurking fear of that dark space somewhere above. 

I don’t have a physical form anymore, but my conscious is still here, somehow, alone in this world where I can do nothing but observe. I suppose I must have some sort of unfinished business to attend to. But what business can you possibly finish when everything you are is empty? What tasks can you possibly attend to when your past and your future are the same shade of gray as yourself?

It’s my first Halloween as a ghost. It feels a little different, watching everyone’s lives tick by, watching them pretend to understand the meaning of life and death, dressing up like the dead and then doing the things most characteristic of life itself. But somehow, although death is different in a lot of ways, it’s also exactly the same. 

Even in life, I had always been rather passive, an observer attuned to the abstract. I often felt as though my eyes had been covered by a sort of film, a lens which allowed me to see things that should have been unseeable. I had never understood the strong links that others seemed to have to life and to each other, and even less the way they clung to them, like a raft in a storm at sea. Even if I did understand, it was only for a few fleeting moments, after which I returned to the realm of emptiness; the realm which I now know to be death.

I suppose there are only two real differences between life and death, at least for me. One is that in life, I felt out of place, like a rough black stone among marbles; in death, I am so united with my existence that I hardly exist at all. 

There is also the fact that in life, I thought I was empty. In death, I know it to be true, with a certainty so cold that it chills me. That certainty is as cold as the fear, the only thing I carried with me across the border between the two worlds that were much closer than I had ever thought. It must be, I think, that fear is so fundamental to me--or to us-- that even death fails to strip it away. 

Death has stripped away far too many things. But even with the fear, even with the darkness of space, it feels more like a home than my life ever did. Here in this shadowy film, I am free to think; to ponder the secrets of existence like I have all the time in the world. And I suppose I do. 

Maybe one day I’ll enter that darkness that I fear so much. Maybe that’s the only way to leave the thinness of this place; I don’t know. All I know is this: death is almost as empty as the yawning void itself. It’s not what I expected, and it’s not what I wanted. But it’s what I received, and the feeling of it was closer to my soul than I ever could have guessed; I think this emptiness has always been a part of me. 

In some ways, I have always been a ghost. I am a ghost now. And maybe I always will be.