A year ago, give or take a couple months, my father left this vale. It was unexpected, the result of an accident that put him in the E/R, and a week later, rendered further treatment unnecessary.
Not too much later, a friend of mine lost a daughter. In her case, every day and week of life, for nearly two decades, was a precious joy held close against a lifelong chronic illness. That said, it too caught his family off guard when she suddenly took a turn for the worst. The term he used, describing flashes of memory and emotion getting through Thanksgiving nearly a year later, a holiday she had been an active participant in, was "what might have been." One may also use "ghost sightings" for moments you expect those passed to come around the corner depending on how metaphorical one is being. I've mentioned before that I'm not inclined to dismiss the literal too quickly.
As another friend put it, it's how you know love persists through the barrier.
Perhaps it's because we have a streak of the poetic, or spiritual bent, that we can see this.
I also think that it is a reflection of our modern and materialistic age that so few people got the point regarding the ability of love to transcend space and time in Interstellar. Even dressed up in purely secular and material garb. many who saw it dismissed it as new-age bullshit.
It wasn't.
Once one accepts that there are things which are not material, yet are entirely real, one also can know that love is real. And that movie in part attempted to show exactly how love and faith could cross the barriers of time and space - and the curtain between our existence and what comes next. It entirely hinged on the bond that a father has with his child. A bond that persisted on faith, across years and light-years.
It is a bond that persists, in memory, through the years, among family and friends. It persists beyond time, across space, and yes, through death.
We all persist in the memory of joy
