Empty houses

Empty houses and empty bodies: I suppose the rest of the observation is obvious enough. But the familiarity of the comparison doesn’t douse the poignancy of the moment when you look at a house you thought had life in it and realize that the person who made it something more than just a building is gone.

We know it the whole time all the time: that we’re limited, that people will go and we will be left without the annoyance and joy of their daily presence in our lives. But there’s a pause like a quiet midnight even in the middle of the day looking at flower bushes and tomato plants left unattended as family or friends or workers come and go to pay their respects to the material goods that serve as small reminders of the moments that someone once thought to memorialize for themselves.

You ever seen a picture of a golden retriever? Probably not this one, and even less likely you once stood in that living room and listened to the story behind it. And yet that photograph will well-outlast the meaning it held to make it more precious than if it were made of true gold.

At best, life is but a jumble of moments and mementos when we look back, and it’s strange to see these things without the person who gave them meaning; it’s strange how things seem to hold so much more meaning in their absence. Because, in that bit of fading light at the end of a life, like the last rays of sunlight up in a burst over the horizon, the angle of perspective gives that last sliver of a thing so much more significance just before it’s gone.

Because we all know we will go this way as well, and maybe we want to look at that picture a little longer, the one that evoked so much pride when the person lived, because they won’t look on it again and it won’t stir emotion in them again... and there’s something about all of us in that.

All our hurt, our joy, our resolutions to be better men and women that wear the faces of some other soul we have admired, this strange soup of habits and motives and expectations about the world that is wholly unique to one person out of all the billions, all of that is just memories and rutted tracks in our minds. And once the lights go out in that library of experiences, those so very special books stored there will never be read by another soul.

Afterlife or not, on walking through a building erected by hands attached to arms run by a brain that long ago stopped running anything, I cannot help but wonder at the afterimage of their influence left within the world, itself equally impermanent, though a bit longer lived.

And so what do we mourn? Or, at least, what do I mourn here? What is it about ruins or fallen empires unrelated to anything we are that causes so many to fascinate at the bits that remain?

All the things that fit here don’t have easy words or simple descriptions, because the easy words and simple descriptions explain it all as much as saying, “It’s yellow,” explains a sunset.

But there’s beauty in the empty and in the silence; there’s some room for reverence there, and whether anyone deserves it or not, it’s satisfying in a way to give it. I don’t know that there’s a certain meaning in death or even life. I always feel like it’s speaking out of turn in these moments to act as if we'd really know the will of any creator, or that just how well a life was lived makes the end of it any better.

Perhaps, I should just shush myself here, and let the silence speak for all the feeling we haven't invented quite the right words for yet.