After my father’s death I lifted myself up onto a podium of self-importance equal in mass to the hundreds that attended his funeral, most of whom I’d never met, their faces cooked in crispy magnificence like faces on the news at a convention in a foreign country where everyone but you have been invited. I had to fold his presence and story into me the way a medium is said to of a ghost who won’t let go, to finish whatever work was left unfinished. I did the same for my grandparents after they died, and mothers who, though not dead, became something lost to me as a youngster, who had to find his way back through grief to the heart of the present in order to feel like a self with a story in the contextual world. Those that leave us we’re taught to let go of when it’s time, whatever that means, but the truth is they just get folded into us like flour into a dough, and the more that leave, the bigger and chewier the pie, the more that leave, the more this pizza chef of the dead I like to imagine myself as will be folding a cloud-like memory into meaning until it sort of signals it’s ready to become his next big thing to roll out onto the always cold and economical counter of time.