Her Ghost Comments

I can't if the speaker is dealing with his own eventual death, or of this is a persona poem in which someone already dead speaks about her experience. It's just a detail you could clarify in a sentence, it doesn't really matter. I read the poem, with each possibility and the poem was moving in both situations. What distinguishes it is the language, sometimes eloquent, sometimes ironic, always moving. It embodies the kind of courage many of us gain in old age, when our earlier fear of death is overcome not through heroic posturing or philosophical breakthrough in understanding. No, it is a gradual, life long reconciliation with death, which we stop fearing and incorporate into our experience of life as yet another rite of passage, which should be no more scary than birth or confirmation. And then we can die with the same values by which we lived and not scramble for some last minute belief system we did not live by. Integrity will thus characterize our end. Amen to that.