I don't have an answer here

I'm just curious what you think. A thought experiment BEN DREYFUSS JAN 20 It’s Christmas and your wife is dead. She didn’t just die. She’s been dead for some time. But it’s still raw. You met when you were young. You fell for each other quickly, completely, and irrevocably. You both knew that you were meant to share your lives together. And so you did. And you didn’t doubt it, either of you, ever, and it was good, and it was great, and it was grand, and decades went by and then she got sick, and it was awful, and tragic, and fast, and over. And she died. And you were alone. You are alone. Years later, you are still alone. And it’s Christmas. You work in a big tall building and you don’t want to go home because there is nothing for you there but your memories so you stay late, later than you need to. Everyone else has gone because they have places to be and people to be with. Finally, you accept that it’s time to head home. You take the elevator down and exit into the street. The city is never as silent as it is in this moment. Not a soul in sight. It is snowing. You could call an Uber or take the train, but there is something about the night that makes you think, ‘Ah, screw it, I’ll walk.’ And so you trudge through the empty streets. There are some drunken carolers in the distance, but for the most part, it is you, the closed shops, the falling snow, the bitter cold, and your self-pity. And then, all of a sudden—BAM: the sewer grate you hadn’t noticed you’d stepped on gives way and you plummet down into the darkest bits of the subway system. This is it. This is the end. Your vision goes dark. You are going to die. But then the funniest thing happens: you don’t. You open your eyes and see light piercing through the blackness. You hear a voice. “Buddy, you ok?” It’s the morning, and you’ve lived. Some construction worker in a hard hat directs you to a ladder, and the next thing you know, you’re above ground. You are not even hurt! A bit shaken, a bump on the head, yes, but basically fine. You are so embarrassed that you convince the city worker not to call an ambulance. It’s still very early, and the streets are still very empty, but what few people you do see seem happy. You walk the rest of the way to your home. You go up the elevator. You open the door to your apartment. There your dead wife sits. “Hello,” she says. She looks as beautiful as you remember—before cancer ate her away. You ask her what’s going on. She doesn’t know. You ask if she is a ghost. She doesn’t know. You ask if she is a hallucination. She doesn’t know. You talk it out and reach the mutual conclusion that you have probably had some sort of traumatic brain injury and are still lying down in the hole, hallucinating. You’ll probably die any minute now. But she smiles and says, “but not yet.” And the minutes pass into hours, and the hours pass into days, but you don’t go anywhere. You don’t die—like you should—in that hole. She doesn’t go anywhere, either. She’s just there with you again in your life. And you’re happy together. And you have all those moments that her cancer stole from you. No one else can see her. She is either magic or a hallucination. But she is real to you. It doesn’t make any sense, but do you care? You can investigate it. You can go look in the hole. You can consult a priest. You can get a brain scan. You can you can you can you can do everything, but can you accept it? Can you say, “I don’t care if I’m splayed out bleeding from my head in a hole and that this is the longest hallucination anyone has ever had before they died”? Can you say, “Nothing I know about the world tells me it’s possible, but isn’t it maybe possible that I fell down the one magic hole in the one magic city and now my wife is back, and I can live out my days with her”? The alternative is trying to get her to go away. Trying to ignore her because you are convinced she isn’t real and that you’re crazy and that you have a moral obligation to try to be sane. Could you accept this bliss on its own terms or not? Anyways, just a thought experiment! I’m curious what your answer is. Happy Friday! Meh. I've been alone most of my life. Ever since Sue & I broke up. That was what ? The 1980s I think. She lived in Wheel Estates in Westfield. There hasn't been a single person yet. Not one.