I have talked to the dead. They are, on the whole, better conversationalists than the living. They do not interrupt. They do not spend the time you are speaking to them composing what they intend to say next. They do not, which is the great relief of it, offer advice.

The living are so very busy with their advice. They hand it to you like a coat you did not ask for and then watch you, expectantly, until you put it on. And if you do not put it on they are hurt. And if you do put it on they are satisfied in a way that has nothing whatsoever to do with whether you are warm.

We cannot let a silence exist without filling it with something we believe to be helpful. We see a person sitting quietly and assume they are in need. We cannot fathom that someone might sit with an unanswered thing and prefer it unanswered. We have, I think, helped a great many people into saying things they did not yet mean, because we could not bear the silence between the hurt and the response. We wanted it resolved. We wanted it repaired.

We wanted, above all, to have been the one to repair it.

That is what most love is. If we are being honest. And we are not being honest, most of us, most of the time, which is why the dead are such great company.

There was a storm. I will not speak of it beyond what it was, which was itself, completely, without any interest in my interpretation of it. It came from the north and it took the night and in the morning what it left was not destruction exactly. Everything that had been loosely attached was gone. What remained was meant to remain.

And the silence...

I have given great thought to that silence. I have not found a word for, not peace, peace is too soft and too earned for what this was. It was more like violent clarity that. The air had been argued into honesty.

I stood in it and my heart was the loudest thing.

And then a question.

I will not tell you what it was. To speak would be the kind of betrayal I have spent this whole meditation accusing the living, you, of. It was more of a hunger, or thirst, from somewhere beyond the part of me that has opinions. It was a question that does not expect an answer. It expects you to stand still long enough to be changed by the asking.

Standing still is, of course, the one thing we have made almost impossible to do with dignity. I was raised among people who believed that the appropriate response to being asked a difficult question was to answer it immediately, confidently, and even incorrectly. To hesitate was weakness. To say I do not know was an admission of failure, perhaps even humility, even if no one was fooled.

I have failed, then, beautifully. I am an expert.

The living will forgive you for almost anything except silence. You can betray them and they will make a story of it. You can abandon them and they will write themselves as the hero of that story. But sit across from them and say nothing and they will come apart. They cannot bear it. They will fill it with themselves, with questions and reassurances, but mostly with their own noise.

I have sat with someone who had done something unforgivable, and I said nothing to him for what must have been four minutes. It was the most violent thing I have ever done to another person. More violent than if I had struck him. He began to sweat. He wrung his hands. He started three sentences and abandoned each one halfway through. And I understood, in that long and ruthless quiet, that silence is not the absence of a thing. It is the thing itself.

Silence has teeth.

He confessed, eventually. I had not asked him to. Silence cannot be resisted. There is no argument to defeat. There is no accusation to deny. It just waits, and inside of it the other person is left alone with what they know, and that is insufferable to them without an audience.

The dead, though, the dead. They have been practicing silence with a commitment the living cannot match.

Beauty, real beauty, has nothing to do with pleasantness. The most beautiful things I have witnessed were not pleasant. They were, several of them, terrible. A woman I knew, dying slowly of a disease that took her body in stages, like a tide going out, said something so true near the end that the three people in attendance all looked away from her. It was the most coherent thing any of us had ever heard and we were ashamed, suddenly, of every careless sentence we had ever spoken in her presence.

I cannot tell you what she said. It belongs to her and to that dying day and I will not drag it out of its place to cheapen it with a display in mine.

The living believe beauty is transferable. It is not. You cannot take it out of the place where it occurred and show it to someone later as proof that your life has been meaningful. It happens. It is seen, or it is not. And then it is gone, and you are a person who saw it, and that fact will change nothing visible about you. No one will know. You will not win anything for having been present. The beauty will not appear on any record or be useful in any conversation.

And yet.

And yet you are different after. You will go on being different for the rest of your life, and if someone asks you why you are the way you are you will not be able to point to this day and say: there. The change is nothing you can defend. It just is. Like the storm, with complete disinterest in your interpretation.

I can’t deal with people who have no history of having been devastated. I am aware of this lack of generosity. I realize it does not meet the some moral standard for how we are meant to speak about one another, with that thin gruel of empathy that passes for connection now. But I do not trust a person who has not had the whole world come down around them at least once, because I do not believe they have been made yet. They are still the rough draft. They are, really, that which existed before the question and the silence, and they are living confidently inside opinions they have not yet had to defend with a life held in balance.

I am not most certainly not recommending devastation. The devastated are not better company, and they are certainly not kinder. They are just complete in a way that the undamaged are not. Fired. In the old sense of the word. They have been through the kiln and what came out is what there is, and they do not need to prove it for you because it has already been tested and they know what it can bear.

The undamaged flock to every catastrophe with their hands out, ready. Their empathy, enormous as it is, reeks of fraudulence. They have studied suffering the way a gifted student studies a subject. Thoroughly, perhaps. Intelligently, most certainly, But from the outside.

The dead have no interest in the study of you. They sit with you and they say nothing and in that nothingness is what they learned while they were here.

And that is simple. Most of the things we say to each other are not necessary, and most of the necessary things cannot be said.

The storm passed. As they do. The silence after it lasted, what, an hour, perhaps two. Then the sounds came back. The world resumed its business of being loud and unremarkable and sure of itself.

I do not think I was able to continue with it.

I stayed in the silence a while longer. I am neither brave nor wise nor any of the things I would like to be. The question was still there, and I am not finished being asked.

I do not think I ever will be. And that, if I am being honest, and we are being honest now, the two of us, in this silence we have made together between what I have written and what you have not yet said, that is the most beautiful thing I know.

Not the answer.

The asking. The long, unfinished asking. The fact that something in me was found worth the question at all.