What-If Questions: If you could bring back any 3 people from the dead, who would they be? Why?

My dad. (Photo Credit: Author's personal collection)

If you could bring back any 3 people from the dead, who would they be? Why?

My answer depends on the following variables:

In which state do I want to revive them? Am I allowed any flexibility as to how old they are and their state of health when I bring them back, or am I locked in the Stephen King-like Hobson’s Choice of “Yeah, you can bring them back to life if you want, but you’d have to settle for getting them at the same age they were at the time of their deaths.”

Is there a certain time limit that I can have them with me? You know, like “You can have them back, but only for a week. Then they die again and you can’t revive them again.”

To be honest, I’m not really sure if I could do this - if I had the power to bring back people from death. But let’s say that I could and that I retrieved three people from “the undiscovered country” at the prime of their lives, in good health, yet aware of who I was, these are the people I’d bring back:

My father: I lost my dad less than a month before my second birthday. He was a pilot (civilian cargo aviation, not a military or passenger airline pilot) and he died when his poorly maintained C-46 Commando crashed near Miami International Airport. My widowed mother (who passed away four years ago this coming July) raised me mostly on her own, with occasional assists from her side of the family, but there’s this part of me that even at my age feels as though I was robbed of my dad’s presence. I would probably ask him a lot of questions about his life, flying, and maybe see if we have similar tastes in books, movies, and music. (Mom often assured me that he would have liked, say, James Bond, Star Wars, Star Trek, and many of the other things I enjoy, but I’d want to know for sure.) I probably would ask him to tell me more about his philosophies of life and whatnot, and maybe go to sports events with him.

My maternal grandfather: My mom’s dad and I were close from the time that I first went to live in South America and then, after we moved back to Miami in `72, I enjoyed his occasional visits (accompanied by my loving-but-strict grandmother) to our house. Erudite, elegant, a refined gentleman and a gentle man. I miss him a lot; he died a few months after my 14th birthday after falling and breaking his hip in the apartment he shared with my grandma.

My best friend from fourth grade all the way to my junior year in high school: Of all the three persons I name here, Raul was the youngest when he died at 18 after a bout of pneumonia. He was born with muscular dystrophy, so he was doomed to die young. Smart, funny, and kind, he was my best bud throughout much of my time in South Florida’s public school system. His dad often took us to baseball games and the occasional movie, and he is the guy who told me that I should go see Star Wars, a movie that I didn’t think I’d like, in the fall of 1977. (Luckily for me, VCRs had not yet become a common household home media device, so studios kept hit movies in theaters for longer periods of time than they do now. As a result, thanks to Raul’s prodding, I can say honestly that I’m a Star Wars ’77 fan, but just barely.)