—Hello, Evening.
—Hello. What’s up?
—Just now a jet streamed across the sky, making a high, loud whine; my hands tingled with dread.
—It’s a sound that causes alarm in many. Your experience on 9/11, living near Ground Zero, will always make this ripping roar one of terror for you. I have it, too, from time to time, with thunderstorms. It’s as if all the beating hearts of the dead have gathered.
—Back when I read newspapers made of paper with news on them, I looked every day at the obituaries, and read many of them, not just the ones that detail the story of a life but those in tiny print, the names of the dead lined up next to each other in alphabetical order. How arbitrary it is, with whom your name appears; the company you keep in the alphabet of your dying day. Sharing the same death day is not something we think about, the way we think about sharing the same birthday.
—Well, that knowledge can’t really be, can it, since your death day isn’t known ahead of time. You will never know with whom you shared it. For a sentient human, you say some odd things.
—My neighbor around the corner has a sign on his lawn that reads “Jesus Died for Our Sins.” I pass it each day.
—I’m glad I don’t have to think about these kinds of beginnings and endings that cause such distress among you living. Nobody mourns me. I come and I go, I do not age, or get sick, or die.
—And yet you mark time, day after day. Sometimes, on the anniversary of a death of someone I once loved, I have felt as if that person’s soul has entered and I become slowed and saturated, like a sponge. By now I know a lot of dead people and I realize that fewer and fewer among the living will have also known the people I knew— in a sense, still know.
—But knowing and remembering are not quite the same, or are they?
—Facts aren’t the same as persons.
—But persons are facts, and you know and remember facts about them.
—But facts can never add up to a living being, which is why we grieve.
—Minds are so ornate! Language is so inadequate! I think you will be happier as a ghost.
—Maybe, although I do like being here. In dreams, the dead sometimes return. These visitations are disorienting, yet strangely consoling. I remember after my cousin Elisabeth died, I dreamed of her, and I said, “But Liz, you are dead!” “I know!” she said, giggling. She seemed quite happy, and who could blame her, as she had been so miserably sick.
—Night likes to send the dead to the dreams of the living. It is one of her favorite tricks.
fact (n.)
1530s, “action, anything done,” especially “evil deed,” from Latin factum, “an event, occurrence, deed, achievement,” in Medieval Latin also “state, condition, circumstance,” literally “thing done” (source also of Old French fait, Spanish hecho, Italian fatto), noun use of neuter of factus, past participle of facere, “to do” (from PIE root *dhe-, “to set, put”). Main modern sense of “thing known to be true” is from 1630s, from notion of “something that has actually occurred.”
Compare feat, which is an earlier adoption of the same word via French. Facts, “real state of things (as distinguished from a statement of belief),” is from 1630s. In fact, “in reality,” is from 1707. Facts of life, “harsh realities,” is from 1854; euphemistic sense of “human sexual functions” first recorded 1913. Alliterative pairing of facts and figures is from 1727.