Purple is My Favorite Color

I’ve asked Sugar Maple to take care of this post for me because, honestly, I don’t want to write it.

The following text by Sugar Maple Bough, dedicated to the memory of her parents, Niko and Aspen Bough

You can prepare for death all you want. That doesn’t make it any easier, and it may not even make you more prepared.

It may give you the illusion of being ready. It may help you enjoy more these days you’ve been served.

But still, when death comes, it bites.

At least that’s what I always thought.

My mom taught me differently.

“Purple is my favorite color,” she told me not long ago. “You know why? It’s the color of the human spirit.”

I thought she was joking again, drawing from her hidden goofball trait, trying to pull one over on me.

But I’ve come to realize that she saw something that not many others can see.

Purple is the color of the human spirit.

“We think we’re temporary,” that’s what Mom said. “But don’t be fooled. There is more to us than ones and zeroes.”

My mom talked like that sometimes. I always let her have her say, without trying to understand her words.

“There are mysteries that we can’t begin to fathom with our minds. It takes our souls to understand some things.”

I was at school when Grim came for her. But I could feel the moment I walked into the kitchen that he’d come, and she’d left.

What is it that we feel when someone leaves? And how is it that I know that this leaving isn’t permanent? Because right now, if I close my eyes, I still feel her.

I can feel Dad, too, even the warmth of his hug, with my eyes closed.

There is something of those we love that never leaves. Maybe because it’s part of us. Or maybe because it’s the part of them–the purple part–that just keeps on in a different form.

What kind of solace can I offer my sister? She saw Grim come. She saw our dad plead for Mom, and heard Grim’s ironic answer: “Death belongs only to the multicellular.”

I’ve been thinking of that answer. It may be true in that place my mom referred to as “the other side of the screen,” but here, we are not composed of cells. We are pulses of light and energy. What business does death have in this realm?

I tried to talk to Sal about this. She shook her head, but not in disagreement.

“After the mysteries I saw last night,” she said, “I am ready to believe anything. Absolutely anything.”

“There’s so much more than can be explained by words,” she said.

I like cliches. They are convenient ways of packaging truths that are too hard or too inconceivable to consider otherwise. And so here’s my current favorite cliche: it isn’t death. It is transformation. We don’t “die.” We change form. My parents, both of them, will be back in transparent form. Still them, though their appearance and properties are different.

And what if their ghostly forms are culled? Even if their files are erased, they are not erased. There are patterns that were created in this universe that existed only through my mom and my dad. I have learned that patterns do not fade.

So stop this talk of death. It’s the great lie. All you who believe it is, in fact, the great and only truth: you are mistaken.  There are mysteries greater than that which you can dissect with logic and analysis. There are things you can know only with your spirit.

Purple is my favorite color, and that is no accident.