But there’s a second truth. We can take anything with us that we could not hoard during our lifetimes because it could only be felt, sometimes for a few brief heartbeats, sometimes only in secret. We can take joy with us, and love. Every beautiful moment from our lives. All the light we have peacefully admired, all the lovely scents and laughter and friendship we have collected. Every kiss, every caress, and every song. The wind on our faces; tango; music; the rustle of autumn grass, stiff with frozen dew; the twinkle of the stars; contentment; courage; and generosity. All those things we may take with us. All that is in between.

“Don’t leave empty-hearted,” I whisper to them.

They take one another’s hands and watch the sun disappear below the sea, guardian of us all, with our dreams and our lives.

Hand in hand, they walk back to Ty Kerk, and I go with them, invisible, casting no shadow. Wilder Glass has lit a fire in my grandfather’s hearth, and when he looks at Eddie he is happy and still a little self-conscious. She loves him, and I seldom visit her in her dreams. I follow them singing, and as I sing, I recall everything I used to be.

I can see all the paths that lie open to Madelyn, Sam, and Eddie. I see the moments that will be decisive for them: they show up in a different hue. Still, their future path together is positive.

I sing of the dancing waves out in the Iroise Sea, and I know exactly how it feels when the summer sea leaps against the rocks and dances to the song of the wind. I evoke the complexion of the spring tide and the winter seas, of the light when it rains and the sky turns black and yet the sun still dapples the surface of the lead-gray sea with islands of brightness. I sing of dark blue, turquoise, midnight blue and morning gray, milk-white and bottle-green waves; of the sky’s powerful love for that hot-tempered, multicolored woman, the Iroise Sea, so powerful that it both takes on her colors and lends new ones to her so that they might meld together as closely as love—boundless, inseparable, without distinction between above and below, without end, and without question.

Eddie turns around one last time before closing the door and says under her breath, “Henri Malo Skinner.”

For an instant I feel the wind on my face and taste the salt in the air. I brush a curl from Eddie’s brow. She smiles as if she can feel my touch. Maybe she can.

There’s more between life and death than we can tell from here.

POSTSCRIPT

Afterword and Thanks