Thinking of the soul

By Jaime Garza On March 28, 2021

My brother died, unconscious for 31 days and alone in a hospital bed in the ICU. He died of COVID 19. And so did my two cousins, a nephew and my wife’s uncle, leaving devastated families behind, with memories, funerals, slide shows, burial grounds, tears and empty chairs. All around us, life goes on, families protesting the fact that their living children cannot go to their live school classes, desensitized to the human toll happening all around. And what happens with the dead?

I took my first vaccination 10 days ago. While taking the injection I opened my phone to the picture of my brother, who did not get a chance to get it, and I cried. His soul has not left me.

We tell each other of stories of the dead, that they “never truly die” and that they will live forever in a beautiful place, or that they will be around us, some ethereal figure made of some refined matter, as Mormons like to say. They talk to us in our dreams, leave signs around our houses, but with their bodies cremated or buried in the ground.

I struggle with this fictitious world of ghosts even though this gives families a plausible explanation as to why, where, when and how of this finality. I do not believe in this spirit, a ghost, but I still believe in the soul. There are living examples of that.

Art and soul

Legend has it that Neil Armstrong took with him music to be played. He landed the Eagle in the moon, a first. He put his foot down, also a first, after which he placed the first flag, forever disrupting the pristine rock that is the moon. The first music heard on the moon was the New World symphony by Antonin Dvorak. I happened to stream it just the other day in a production under the direction of Claudio Abbado. He is dead but his soul will live with us as far as someone watches him conducting, the great master of the whispering music, as played in the fourth movement of Mahler’s 9th. Dvorak soul lives forever. I feel them in my life and so do many other people. Before the symphony there had never been music in the moon for millions of years. Music vibrations may persist for all we know.

Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk, Coltrane, James Brown. Their soul remains. Picasso, Rothko, Mondrian, Klein and his blue, all of them imprinted in my mind. Cortazar, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, all here, around me.

The self

The soul is the character, out thoughts, our feelings, our memories, all that what makes us us, which is in itself the self. When you see your baby for the first time, an imprint of his soul is made in yours, changing you forever. A hug, a touch, a kiss, all interactions get imprinted in you. And what you are remains for as long as someone remembers and feels you. Remembering my brother is seeing his tentative smile, his worries, and i clearly feel his last hug at my father’s funeral, who by the way, remains as clear as the light of day.

The soul remains. Maybe not forever, but as far as I can live, it will always be there for me. If there is a ghost that keeps it forever, that would be an unnecessary plus.