On immortality and liminal space

The Kansas City Times

Fri, Feb 08, 1935, p. 18

I used to believe liminal space was something you passed through. A hallway. A staircase. A waiting room with bad coffee and a clock that refused to tick forward. A threshold between what was and what will be. But this morning, on the other side of yesterday, I’m not so sure anymore. What if living is just a liminal space?

IMMORTALITY. 

Do not stand

   By my grave, and weep.

I am not there,

   I do not sleep—

I am the thousand winds that blow,

I am the diamond glints in snow,

I am the sunlight on ripened grain,

I am the gentle, autumn rain,

As you awake with morning's hush,

I am the swift, up-flinging rush

Of quiet birds in circling flight,

I am the day transcending night.

Do not stand

   By my grave, and cry—

I am not there,

   I did not die.

Clare Harner, December 1934 issue of poetry magazine The Gypsy

Clare Harner’s words have been looping in my head since I woke up. Not in a haunting way. Not in a grieving way, exactly. More like a quiet insistence. A reminder that presence isn’t as fixed as we pretend it is. That people aren’t contained by bodies or rooms or even time in the way we wish they were.

Yesterday stretched and folded in strange ways. My dad called me before surgery and told me not to come to the hospital. I went anyway. Of course I did. But before that, there was that moment the kind that doesn’t feel real until it’s already over when he said, “We’ve had a good run. I love you. I wanted to hear your voice today and remember it.” And then, “bye bye.”

It was meant to feel final, even if it wasn’t. Dad’s words were his fear donning a dramatic coat. Even if it was just him being who he’s always been, a bit theatrical and a little too aware of endings.

Still, there it was: a doorway.

I thought liminal space was supposed to be temporary. You’re not meant to live there. You’re meant to pass through, to arrive somewhere more stable, more certain, more decided. But what if it’s something completely different? What if we’re always in between, between phone calls and goodbyes, between who someone was and who will be, between the version of the future we imagine and the one that actually unfolds?

Yesterday, I sat with my dad for four hours while he lay there post-recovery, not allowed to sit up yet. I fed him Chick-fil-A like a baby bird, perhaps a cannibalistic bird but still. He had never had it before. Now he’s a fan. This is how life works, apparently: you can be on the edge of something enormous and still discover fast food for the first time.

We talked. We laughed. We made plans. And the beauty is that it doesn’t matter whether any of those plans will actually happen. That wasn’t the point. The point was that we were there together.

Harner’s poem doesn’t deny death. It just refuses to let it be a boundary. It stretches presence across everything… light, air, movement, morning.

And sitting there yesterday, it felt like that too: like life isn’t something you either have or lose. It’s something that keeps changing its shape. Something that refuses to stay in one form long enough for us to feel secure. Which is terrifying. And also, a relief. Because if living is the liminal space, then we were never meant to arrive at certainty. We were never meant to lock anything in place and say, this is it, this is safe, this is permanent.

We are meant to notice. To sit in hospital rooms and feed our dads chicken nuggets. To hear the “bye bye” and not know what it means yet. To keep going anyway.

Growing up, my dad used to say, “I hope you live forever and the last face you see is mine.” It always felt funny and ominous. My dad did not die yesterday. It feels almost too simple to write that. Like it should come with more ceremony, more explanation, more meaning attached. But maybe that’s the point. He didn’t die. Not yesterday. And so here we are, still in it. Still in the in-between. Still in the strange, shifting, unfinished middle that we keep trying to call something else.

Maybe there is no “other side” of liminal space. Maybe the other side is just realizing you never left. That this fragile, ordinary, extraordinary moment is it.

The hospital room. The laughter. The “bye bye” that didn’t end anything. The fact that he’s still here. The fact that, for now, so am I.

Liminal Space

   This weekend, I am scheduled to give a presentation at the Virginia Forum, an academic conference devoted to the study of Virginia’s past, where I will talk about liminal spaces: cemeteries, ghost stories, Deaf history, and the unstable edges of memory. But right now, my attention is elsewhere. My dad is in the hospital, with heart surgery scheduled for tomorrow, and I find myself suspended in a space that feels neither fully before nor after, but entirely in between. I am in a liminal space. 

   Growing up, Dad and I shared a quiet understanding. It was never formal, never something we treated as superstition, but more like an unspoken agreement between us. If something were to happen, if one of us crossed over to the other side, we would try, however we could, to reach back. A sign, a feeling, some small flicker of connection to let the other know. It was never about fear; it was about continuity, about the refusal to believe that connection simply ends. 

   In my work, I often describe cemeteries as liminal landscapes, places that exist at thresholds between life and death, presence and absence, memory and forgetting. Cemeteries are not just about the dead; they are about the living and how we choose to remember. They are spaces where stories remain unfinished, which is why they are so often described as haunted, not only by ghosts, but by histories that have not settled. Ghosts, in this sense, are not merely supernatural figures but narrative ones, appearing where something unresolved continues to linger. Liminal spaces are where those unresolved stories surface. 

   Right now, the hospital feels like its own kind of threshold space. Everything is paused. Time does not move normally; it stretches, loops, and holds. We sit together and talk, circling through ordinary conversations, memories, small jokes, and familiar stories, while something enormous hovers just beyond what we can name. There is a strange intimacy in this waiting, a heightened awareness, as though we are already standing at the edge of something, even though we have not crossed it. 

   In my presentation, Haunting the Dead: Liminal Landscapes, Ghostlore, and the Politics of Public Memory in Virginia, I argue that liminal spaces enable reinterpretation. Their instability, their refusal to be fixed, creates the conditions for new meanings to emerge. Cemeteries, once carefully designed landscapes that reinforced hierarchies of race, gender, and ability, now also serve as sites of tourism, storytelling, and reinterpretation. They are not static; they shift, inviting us to reconsider who is remembered and how. But liminal space is not only something I study. It is something I live. 

    As someone who exists between hearing and deafness, between spoken and signed language, between different modes of communication, I have long understood liminality as a condition of being. It is the experience of not fully belonging to one category or another, of being present but not always recognized, heard but not always understood. That experience has shaped how I approach history and storytelling, but it also shapes how I sit here now, waiting in this hospital room. 

    In my research, ghost stories function as informal archives. They preserve emotional truths that official records cannot fully contain, acknowledging presence without always granting legitimacy. They mark that something happened, even when it cannot be fully explained. Waiting feels like that, like an unfinished sentence, a story that has not yet decided what it will become. 

    This week, Dad and I have spent hours talking. Not in dramatic, last-words fashion, but in the quiet, steady rhythm of everyday conversation. There is comfort in that ordinariness, but also an undercurrent of awareness that this moment is not ordinary at all. It is a threshold moment, one that exists entirely in between what has been and what will be. 

    In one part of my talk, I describe a moment during an ASL cemetery tour when a group paused because one participant could not climb a steep hill. Instead of continuing, everyone waited. That pause became the point. It was a moment where movement stopped, and care took precedence, where being together mattered more than moving forward. That is what this feels like now, not progress, not resolution, but presence. 

    I do not know what will happen tomorrow. That is the nature of liminal space; it resists certainty. But I do know that being fully present in this moment is its own kind of work, that sitting at the threshold without turning away matters. In my talk, I say that to haunt the dead is not to romanticize loss, but to remain with what is unresolved, to refuse to let stories disappear, to stay at the edge where meaning is still being made. 

   I am not in a cemetery, but I am in a space that feels just as suspended, just as charged, just as unfinished. Perhaps that is what liminal space ultimately is, not just a place, but a way of paying attention, a way of being in the world when you do not yet know how the story ends. If something were to happen, Dad and I already know our agreement: we will try to reach across, to say something, to remain connected. But for now, we are still here, still talking, still waiting, still in the middle of it, still in liminal space.

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