BarlowFriendz: Coda

John Barlow writes that a poignant piece about a friend who has been missing for several days and is now believed to have committed suicide.

There's a vision I can't get out of my mind. I imagine him bobbing in that lethal water, watching the ferry churn away. The lights of lower Manhattan glittering behind him, as functionally distant as stars in space. For several minutes, he was as certainly dead as he is now and yet fully, lucidly alive. He was in a bardo, as the Tibetans call the stations of death, and yet he was in a bardo that lies within the physical world. I am letting myself believe that those minutes were a transport of release, an utter peace. A glory at last.