Did Del tell you this story? Is this why you loved him? What was lovable about him?

Del saw his first ghost that night, his first alien abduction happened not long after. The lightning electrified Del, marked him. The lightning made Del a hero to the boy I was. And I maybe have seen him like that since, not actually seeing him with my physical eyes, perpetually awestruck. In my imagination, Del is more mythic than human, but really, Del died sometime between his writing the note and our arrival at the mine.

Del's fourth wife Brandy said he was killed by a collapsed wall of cloudy magnesite, rocks like thin milk, like altostratus clouds, and turquoise blue mcguinnessite, rocks the color of your eyes, of Chris's, in the federal mining claim Del and Brandy purchased at the bottom of the recession in 2009. When she told us we could go down and pay our respects, Chris snorted. Respect for what?

Brandy says they couldn't retrieve his body, but that this is what Del wanted, to be buried in the mine. I think he expected to expire first of all, though, not be killed and buried at the same time, she said. She and her sons, our half-brothers, made a grave site by arranging a series of milky-white magnesite pieces in a heart shape just to the left of the mine entrance. The boys were at work, she told us, laying sod in town.

She handed me a crumpled piece of notepaper that she says Del wrote as a last will and testament. Fully uncrumpled, it is one sentence long: The feds don't need to know nothing about this.

It's the same handwriting that's in our note from Del, but when Chris showed Brandy our note she frowned at him.

That ain't from Del, she said.

Who else would have written it? Chris asked.

That part ain't my problem.

Here is what the website says Thomas Edison says, in his autobiography, about the afterlife:

Now, I don't make any claims whatever to prove that the human personality survives what we call “death.” All I claim is that any effort caught by my apparatus will be magnified many times, and it does not matter how slight is the effort, it will be sufficient to record whatever there is to be recorded. Frankly, I do not accept the present theories about life and death.