Stories of the Dead & the Living

Sorry about the last post — I was off by a day. I guess things have been a little hectic lately. My Mom, I’m glad to say, is mostly OK, but you know how it is: the doctors run some tests, find some stuff, run some more tests. They make adjustments. We make adjustments too.

I am also editing an essay to be published by Joyland Magazine, probably in February. It’s a particularly meaningful essay to me because it’s about trying to locate and bring back from Mexico the ashes of a high school classmate, Justilien Gaspard. Instead of finding his ashes, as I searched for him and talked to the people who knew him, I found out more about who he was, and why he was remembered by the people who did remember him.

When I started the process of trying to repatriate Justilien’s ashes, I didn’t yet know much about him. In high school, he had taught me the Russian for “no” — “nyet” — and he hadn’t kissed me when we spent one messy evening together on the banks of the Red River. I knew he was cute, and he liked black-and-white photography.

I didn’t know he was gay, or that his father, a Jehovah’s Witness, had disowned him off-and-on for years due to him being gay. I had so much to learn.

About a week ago, 23 animals were taken off the endangered species list, pending a 60-day public comment period. Some species, like the ivory-billed woodpecker, have a host of backers who are already writing defenses of the animal, saying that it’s too soon to declare it extinct. Here’s one published on the Audubon website, by one of the last people known to have seen the ivory-billed woodpecker, in 2004.

I really can’t speak to whether the ivory-billed woodpecker is extinct or not, or whether any of the other animals due to be removed from the endangered list are also extinct. I can only say that, in my own very limited experience, when you go looking for the news of the dead, you tend to end up with stories about the living instead. Even if all of these animals are extinct, it might still be worth thinking about them, talking to people who knew them well, cataloging knowledge about them, letting them tell their stories about themselves, and letting them remind us about who we were, who we are, and who we’d like to be.