This contains spoilers for Kentucky Route Zero, an incredible poem of a video game.
In Act 1 of Kentucky Route Zero, one of the first things you do is track down the Márquez farmhouse and meet Weaver. You probably will get the sense something is strange about her before this moment but she has this incredible piece of dialogue.
"We're about the same age, well we were, she's older now"
— Shannon Weaver, Kentucky Route Zero
Because Weaver is a ghost. And speaking of it this way, she is a ghost maybe not (or not only) because she has died, but because time has stopped for her. Because in Kentucky Route Zero, the ghosts do not haunt, they are the haunted. By regret, by debt, by everything but ghosts. The story is full of people immobilized by some circumstance trying to figure out how to move on.
And in this way the living ghosts travel on a road trip along the eponymous Zero, a subteranean and perhaps extra-dimensional highway, ostensibly to finish a friend's last job, but also just to find somewhere else to be.
In this way it frames purgatory as a state of mind, albeit brought on largely by the pressures and isolations of a relatively modern world. And how continuing to seek friendship and community is the way of passing on to the other side, to a new life after all the tragedy.
The story can be a bummer sometimes but it lets you name and pet and feed your dog so it's not all bad. I think by the end it's really an uplifting if bittersweet story about the power of community and love to overcome the oppressive structures of the world, to create tiny pockets of heaven in purgatory, if you will.
And we should.