remains

We tell stories about who dead people were. We make connections between their choices, their struggles, their moments of grace or failure.

This can feel like wisdom. As if we’ve learned something true about them now that the noise of their existence has ceased. We might even experience guilt that it took their dying for us to see them clearly.

But we might not be seeing them clearly at all. We’re just seeing them differently. 

When someone is alive, they keep disrupting our understanding of them. They surprise us. They act out of character. Challenge our assumptions about them. Refuse to be who we thought they were. They grow or regress or contradict themselves. Our understanding of them stays provisional because they won’t hold still.

Then death freezes them in the moment they stopped. But strangely, our understanding of who they were keeps moving, reshaping itself around the gaps they left, the questions they can no longer answer.

Now they become whoever we need them to be in order to navigate their absence. The difficult father becomes the man who did his best. Or the man who damaged us beyond repair. The distant friend becomes the person who truly saw us. Or the relationship that never really mattered. The parent we didn’t visit becomes someone we understood completely. Or someone we never knew at all.

Hindsight can make any of these versions feel true. It provides evidence for whichever story we’re telling. It convinces us we’ve finally grasped who people were, what they meant to us, what we should have done differently.

But confidence doesn’t ensure accuracy.