Is soul a real thing?

THE EDITOR, Madam:

As powerful as the human mind can be it seems to begin like an empty vessel, filling itself with thought and understanding from the experience of its host and partner. The soul which must certainly be unlike the mind, fully developed at birth. We wonder is the soul a real and true thing? It is most certainly a spirit.

For the last years of their lives my parents and I lived together, good friends; they in their 80s, and myself, a quarter-century younger, alone and retired from our working careers. Fully conscious, alert and in no pain, each passed within a minute with no warning, as if God took them in his hands, snatching them up to his heart, painlessly, unknowingly, a blessing for the goodness in the lives they each had led.

For each, one day some “thing” was there inside them and the next day it was gone. The thing I’m speaking of was most certainly their soul, an eternal spirit that lives within each of us, the energy that tells us where and who we are each time we return from our rests, awakening from our temporary sleep, before the final time our eyes are closed.

It is the very spirit that lives alike in me and you. My own now guides my hands as they lie on the keyboard typing out this letter. I can feel its power and sense its wondrous mystery in the messages we can share with our lives. Can you? Is the soul a real and true thing?

I can tell you I miss dearly the two who brought me to this world and unconditionally loved me, as I did and still do them, for every moment of their lives. It often feels as if a part of those two souls lives still in me today and always will.

Some believe the soul is an eternal light that each human is promised, given, and will remain with all who have known it, even after the last darkness in each of their lives.

I believe it is real, because I have lived my life.

ED MCCOY

Bokeelia, Florida