Peter Rollins: Ghosts are real…
Those we love will always be remembered, but when we have unfinished business with them, when we feel that they died to us before their time, they will continue to haunt us. While the light of their life is extinguished, a faint but persistent aroma of their presence remains.
While those we cherish were absent to us before we ever met them, the absence that is formed in their aftermath is of a fundamentally different quality. For this posthumously generated absence has weight and substance. It is, as Sartre would say, a felt absence.
…this ghostly presence of an absence is what haunts us until we make our peace with it and let it go.
To do this we must learn how to mourn, for mourning marks the passing of the dead and allows us to make peace with our ghosts.
Funny he should write this soon after I wrote this.