"We believe that there is nothing after death because when we ask the dead, they say nothing."
I don't know who said that, but I think maybe they never ate peaches. At least, they never sat under a peach tree and ate the biggest one they could find and thought about all the possibilities in life and death and all the ones between. I did, once. You can figure a lot, when you're under a peach tree in late June, with the sweet smell of grass and bark and sky and a soft wind on a warm (but never too warm) morning, when the world is not quite asleep but not quite awake yet, and all the sounds are combine in a soft hhhhhhhhhhhhh sort of way.
You figure a lot, then.
You figure that maybe the dead do speak, and we're just afraid to listen. Or maybe they don't speak because they didn't stick around, but they left the message for us where we couldn't miss seeing it - though granted we may stare at it for a lifetime and never understand. Until, of course, it comes our time to leave our own messages.
But if the dead are talking to us, what are they saying? I used to think it was probably a universal sort of "I still love you" or "the world is an alright place, really." Maybe sometimes they leave more personal messages, things that only their loved ones will find, or understand.
But I think now, though I can't really be sure, that they leave something better than that. Something more. Something that can't quite be put into any living language because it doesn't exist anywhere that the living have seen. Except maybe in the ocean.
I've always liked the ocean. I've always preferred to walk it in the evening, right along the edge of the land, where the cold salty sea hisses up the soft sand and swishes around your skin, enfolding you in the swift water, and then pulls away again, rushing back to the heart it pulsed out from in the first place. I've always liked the sharp scent of salt on a cool breeze, and the feel of sand sifting away under my weight as the sea calls it back to itself, slides it gently out from under you like a mother taking the book from your hand because it's late and you need sleep.
I think, though I am no longer sure of anything, that the ocean is a lot like what the dead are trying to tell us.
And when you're back under the peach tree, maybe in the evening this time, when the sun is in its glorious dying throes, you wonder why the dead are trying to speak at all. Are they trying to impart some vital truth to us before it is too late for us all? Are they just afraid of where they are going? Or is it not for themselves, but for those of us who are still here, stumbling around in the oncoming night? Maybe they are trying to give us some sort of advice - or is it just meant as a little bit of comfort to hold us through the night until the sun bursts, phoenix-like, through the sky again?
Then again, as you watch the first cold, distant star glimmer faintly in the blue-gray edges of the glowing sky, you think maybe they could just be trying to leave some small part of themselves behind. Because they are gone now, in a more final way then we can probably grasp. Its like holding a leaf in your hand, one of the long, wispy green ferns that resemble nothing so much as some strange bird's plumage, and knowing in your heart that you will never see such a thing again. There will never be this moment, this evening, this breath of air, this same leaf, again. Maybe someday you or someone else will sit here, and watch the night creep in, and hold a fallen fern leaf in their hand - but it won't ever be the same, will it? And the dead - they are gone in the way that moment is gone. There are bits and pieces of them that you never saw, that maybe nobody ever saw, not even themselves sometimes, and now no one ever will because they have been swallowed by the unknown, ever living sea.
And you wonder, maybe, why the living at least aren't allowed to know what is hidden in the depths.

What is reality anyway?
Is it possible to fathom at all?
Its so strange, when someone you know dies, is gone, maybe vanished, maybe simply moved on somewhere that we can't see. Yet. And you sit and wonder who they really were. You have your own perceptions of what they were like, what they liked, what they believed. My literary prof loved stories - loved to ask us how the stories we read were trying to portray reality, and trying to get us to buy into their version of it. He was a Southern Baptist, originally. He converted to Catholicism.
But what did that mean? Did he really, in his heart, believe in the stories those religions tell? Did he believe anything? Or maybe he was a believer in those things, and also a believer in something else? I'll never know, now. I don't think anyone will. Even the people who knew him best didn't know him all. What has the world lost, with him gone? What spark, what breath; what words or ideas have been lost or forgotten or simply never made, now? What is reality without him in it? Has it changed at all? Or is it something different now?
I don't know. None of us do.
Not yet.