When I pass,
My essentialness drifting out of reach,
I will look back
Longing through fading eyes
To sculpt a look of implore into my last expression

This is what it will mean:
Try.

Our world is haunted
Lost souls clamber for redemption in the back of our minds and in the peripheral of our daily lives
These are the ghosts of marginalization and sing an unheard chorus of our deepest human regret

With my life I try. I will ask the same in death.
Do everything you can to leave one less bitter phantom behind
Live your life fully and know that you’ve done right…
Not just right by you or your family or your coworkers or me.
But by every living soul you share this world with.
Do right by the world itself

Now, I understand…this is no simple request
But think of a hard days work, or a particularly busy month or year and how getting through that last stretch just feels so good.
Try.
Know that you tried.
And when we pass, let ours be the ghosts of forward motion

Do this, and we can communicate with the color of dreams
And they will honor us with distant memories of a future once imagined

The sun sets on a cool-warm day in November
Tangerine light slipping through a strainer in the sky
Somehow I have just left this place
But I am returned
And it is not as I remember

Funneling down on a cosmic wind from some distant universe,
I arrive to a small house
Familiar, as if from a dream, half remembered
This is not my home, but I get it
This is where it’s supposed to be
There are candles and the sweet smell of conchas, pan de muerte, canella con leche, and mole
Inviting smiles of skeletons welcome me to this flowery fever dream

I land at a strange ofrenda
Huge and intricate
Small and blurry
It is an offering as big as the world yet perceived as an alter…

Yes, there is food
There is a photo of someone who looks like some kind of alternate version of me
grey yes, but not altogether just an older me…
Yes there is sweets, comics , my favorite drink
even a stash of records I thought they’d never find
but there is more
there is a hand print in the earth below
the fingerprints and life lines stretching out between ofrendas
tributaries of intention and will
rivers that my flow deepened over time
tributaries reaching to every corner of the world

that is your potential
and that is my request upon death
to return a thousand years from now
float down on the falling autumn leaves
and see the most magnificent ofrenda I could ever imagine
this world