The young always imagine that meeting the spirits of the Ancestors will be a gift. They picture warm embraces, gentle words, the completion of what death interrupted. They picture forgiveness freely given and love returned without condition. They picture peace.
Let the old tell you what the young refuse to hear.
When you call the Amadlozi across the bridge of Uthingo, you are not calling back a memory. You are not calling back the comfort you lost. You are calling back a spirit that has walked in the Lands of the honored dead, that has seen what you cannot see, that has shed the softness the living mistook for their whole being. The spirit that answers you is not the one you buried. It is older. It is harder. It has remembered things it could never say while it drew breath, and it carries grievances that outlived its flesh.
