I’ve conversed with the dead for most of my life. It started consciously when I first played Christoph Gluck’s Dance of the Blessed Spirits for Flute and Piano. I was in conversation with Gluck, my flute, the pianist, the spirits, ancient myths and archetypes, and my father, who had just died.

You could say I was haunted. That’s far better than being hunted, which is often what I was when my father and his friends were alive. Just one added vowel, with its open ah indistinguishable from awe, made all the difference. Haunted. Haunted. Haunted.

I no longer had to live inside the territory known as hunted, which was piss-marked at each corner with words like blunted, grunted, shunted, and fronted.

I will always give thanks to the dead for allowing me to fully live. The dead composers, the dead musicians, the dead artists, the dead poets, the dead weavers, the dead spirits, the dead mythical figures who never actually die, the dead archetypes who are alive in all of us, and the father who died an untimely death just as his abuse was moving from covert to overt because his daughter’s puberty triggered something inside him that was even darker than the dark he was before.