There is an old curvy side road that meanders to and fro through the Tennessee countryside that I used to walk down with Dad and my brothers when I was a little boy.

On a bright beautiful day, in the absence of distractions that come from having money enough for a car or a trip to the movies or arcades at the mall, my dad would take our little restless legs and endless energy on long walks around the fields and forests where we lived. I never thought much about it when I was younger, but I’ve closed my eyes and floated down that road many, many times as an adult now. Moldering away in prison, I revisit memories of a lifetime gone by and vanished but for small flickers here and there.

I remember the tiger lilies that grew in dazzling profusion along the road banks and the smell of uncut and dew kissed hay rustling in the warm morning breeze. The smell of green and growing things all around me. I recall an old graveyard back off the road in a thicket of pine trees that was half covered in an immense tangle of honeysuckle that my brothers and I would burrow into like rabbits in their warrens, making mazes and tunnels through the clustered mass of vines.

We would jump into and over the sunken graves while we chased each other in our never-ending games that only little kids could know all the rules to. I remember thinking to myself how odd it was that the graves didn’t have tombstones at their heads… only old field stones marked each plot out from the overgrown weeds and vines that hid them from the rest of the world. I had never seen graves without people’s names carved into headstones before. So I asked my dad who these people were.

When he told me they were “just people,” I asked him, “Didn’t anyone love them not to write their names on their graves?”

He told me, “These were really poor people, and they died a long, long, long time ago when things were different.” I know now that it was an old forgotten graveyard where the enslaved were buried.

I have gone back there in my mind many times over the years to ask forgiveness for my child self’s undignified and disrespectful behaviour. I’ve always wondered whether my playing ignorantly upon their graves was an affront to them, or did they just lay there watching and reaching up with their spirit fingers trying desperately to touch youth and life once more? I’d like to believe that it is the latter.

I hope with all my heart that when it is my time to lay cold and still in the ground that I should be lucky enough to have children play upon my grave. To feel them skip and laugh as I behold and enjoy the beautiful chaos of their childish games. To marvel at the spark of life still shining bright within them… that is what makes them human and alive. That spark that is like light itself…devoid of color… yet made up of them all.

I’ll tell you now: The LOVE you feel when you’ve met the person you want to spend the rest of your life with doesn’t have a color. The JOY you feel when you look upon your newborn child’s face for the first time doesn’t have a color. The PEACE you feel when you watch the sun set after a perfect day spent surrounded by people you care about doesn’t have a color. And even the SADNESS you feel when you’ve lost someone, and you know your heart will never be the same…none of these things have a color. But they are all some of the most important things that we all hold close to our hearts.

It’s what makes us Family…What makes us Friends… What makes us Human. So, like light, Life has many different shades but only by using your heart as the prism do you see them.

Why is it so hard for people to see that LIFE is and has always been the only important distinction that people should remark upon when truly seeing another person? Isn’t everything else just packaging?

Sometimes I can still see myself standing there on the side of that road in my tattered clothes, dirt smeared face and hands, and my heart aches for that little boy who was always so quiet and so sad. I’ve often thought that when people had asked me why I always looked so sad, that maybe some hearts are just made heavier than others… Maybe some souls are just meant to be weighted down?

Maybe that young boy knew somewhere in the back of his mind that his future self would be looking back upon him from a situation so much harder to bear than his current state of need and want ever was. Sometimes I wish I could go back in time and give my child self a hug and tell him that he is loved and important and has the right to be loved and important to and by other people. That life IS wanting and needing, and when you stop needing and wanting…you stop living. And how not living when you are still alive is an unbearable hell to be reckoned with all on its own.