A Poem for the Undead

"He's ready. I am not. I can't just say good-bye as cheerfully as if he were embarking on a trip to make my later trip go well." -"Elegy for My Father, Who Is Not Dead" by Andrew Hudgins

     One of the questions following this poem covered the differing views of immortality from the father and son's perspective. I felt as though this was one of the main strategies used my the author in this poem, and it deserves some analysis. By the speaker's language, the inference is that his father has experienced all that he has desired in this life and now looks forward to the afterlife, or immortality. The father seems to believe in a greater afterlife, like heaven, while the son is skeptical. The son indicates, as found in the above quote, that he is not ready. I take this to mean that he is not as wise as his father. Later on, he says he cannot see his father welcoming him back to the safety of the dock after he has followed him into death. The son is not quite pessimistic, but rather more agnostic. Not that he is searching for a God, but the son does not clearly see a set of pearly gates with his father walking through them. That does not mean he rules them out though. He says he "can't just say good-bye...," not he won't say good-bye cheerfully. There is a seed of hope that at the end of his own life he will see his father welcoming him back but he knows that his own self-contemplation must come first.