A big element of a good life is gaining the ability to heal.  To heal yourself, to help heal others.   Of all the blessed work in the world, is there any more blessed than being a healer?   Is there a greater service one can perform, in a life of service, than helping others bear the burdens of this world?  

I’m tempted to have the skeleton chime in here, but he has already said goodbye, reminded me that he is dead.  

“I am,” says the skeleton of my father.  

Death, we are sometimes reminded, is not the end– as long as we live to consider those who have left the stage.   We grow, gain perspective, can see the dead differently than we did when they were alive.  We can recover things that were taken from us by people who were brutal, and died.  It takes work, work paid for with invisible coins.  

My father, too busy being a bread winner, was never released from the pain his mother inflicted on him after the brutal, unhappy woman died.   He was not released from the chilling knowledge that all of his aunts and uncles, except Aren, had been in the path of a slaughtering hoard, left dead in mass graves that were never found, somewhere near the hamlet in the marsh that was wiped from the map.  

I’m aware it probably sounds self-righteous of me to ruminate on what makes a good life.  To prescribe the steps toward true righteousness and shit like that.  I speak only for myself, using the example of my father’s life, and self-evident logic: peace is better than pain.  Maybe one can never speak for others, but as for me, I’ve been on a conscious journey to find myself at peace, after decades of senseless war.