What do the living know
about the dead? I was called upon
to wonder when the well-meaning
camp director’s wife who knew
parts of my family asked
where I stood in relation
to the brother who’d died, she had heard.
Died? I said. Yes, I believe, cancer,
she said. Oh, I said, that,
I believe, was me, and I am yet”
even taking odd pleasure along
with the pang of being a ghost”
among the living.
(What do, after all, the living
know about the dead, me included?)
James Andrew Miller is author of “Other Plans: Journal of an Illness,” FT, March.
