No More Jim

Believe it or not

With my friend James Seay, I argued once about what happens after we die. Now Jim is dead. Damn.

He was 86. Had been confined at home for a long time. He had made a living teaching poetry, at the University of North Carolina, and writing it. His stuff was published in the New Yorker and Antaeus and so on, and won him an award from the American Academy and Institute of the Arts and Letters. I went fishing with Jim, and certain other uncouth though highly educated Southern men, for nearly sixty years.

Something about Jim invited contradiction. Once, when we were drinking and theorizing about the afterlife, he expressed the belief that you could be reborn after death, unawarely, in another body. My position was, and is, that since all we have is our body and our awareness, reincarnation is the bunk. He said something spiritual could survive and be passed on. I went, ‘Pffff.” He pointed out that his wife (at the time) was a scientist. I countered that that did not make him a scientist.