Eulogize the Living

by Anders Nelson

Yesterday was awful, as any honest person knew it would be. It was sweet and beautiful and cathartic, but no level of negotiation will make this feel like anything other than the long game of a malevolent, trickster god revealing itself in its completion. But we don’t choose these things so much as they find us, so we are asked to pick what we can from our moments of deepest spiritual agony, and if I can take anything from yesterday and days preceding, it’s this: eulogize the living. Don’t just tell them you love them. Outline where your lives have informed each other, run against each other, divided each other. Make plain the ghost machinery of what you have built, even if it is left unfinished. Give shape to your love-making, your humor, your betrayals, your promises made and your promises kept, your union against a world whose resting state is oblivion (at least, it sure seems like it at a moment like this).

Give shape to it, and look upon it together.

Luke, your life was a promise made and a promise kept. This isn’t goodbye so long as you are my friend. And you will always be my friend.