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Friendly and Unfriendly Ghosts
My husband Don claimed to be able to see or sense both sorts. And since his death, I get the impression sometimes that he's pretty persistent himself. Yes, I know. Absurd, yes?
My husband Don was a strange man. As time goes by, I understand him less. Everything I thought I knew about him is disappearing into his enigmatic last few days and all of the things I learned about him after..
On December 26, 2000 he collapsed at home. It was about 9:00 in the morning, I think. It was a beautiful, balmy Florida day; he’d had a lot to drink the night before, so when we woke up, I wasn’t surprised to hear him say he had a headache. At the time, I lived down the street from my workplace, and for some reason I no longer recall, I woke up worried about something I’d left or failed to bring home. I was also worried about our Siamese cat, Sam, who had escaped a few days before and hadn’t---uncharacteristically---returned home since.
“I’m so worried about Sam,” I told him tearfully, as I was preparing to leave. He was sort of half-awake and was sort of groggy. But the grogginess wasn’t different from his average morning grogginess. He was never a morning person and---as I mentioned---he’d had a lot to drink the night before..
“He’s all right,” Don said vaguely. “He’ll be back. When you get back, I’ll get up and we’ll have a walk. I’ll find him.”
“You think he’s okay?”
“He’s okay. I’m sure of it. I’ve got ESP, you know.”
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Head aches,” he mumbled. “I just need to take a nap. I’ll get up later.”
“Is it all right if I stay at work for a bit? I’d probably get more done if I stayed at work for a couple of hours.”
“See you later,” he said. Which was absolutely the last thing he ever said to me.
I don’t remember my reason for wanting to go to work, but I remember---and this is true---that as I was just sitting down to go through whatever it was, I felt a sudden and very intense surge of anxiety. I gathered up my papers and left immediately. I was already running when I saw my house and my 16 year old stepdaughter standing out on the porch with the phone in her hand. As soon as she saw me, she started screaming my name. She was not, and never has been, the screaming type. I went cold---not because I thought that Don was in any sort of trouble, but because I thought our cat had been killed.
“What?” I said, “What? Did something happen to Sam? Jessie? Is it Sam?”
“It’s Daddy!” she yelled in that same high-pitched squeal. “Please come in! Hurry! Please, hurry!”
Inside the house, my 7 year old stepson was sobbing. “I was asleep,” he said, in between the sobs, “And Daddy came and woke me up. At first I thought he was playing with me because he was going “Unnnnnhhhhh” and then he stumbled in the kitchen and fell down. Now he won’t get up! I don’t know what happened to him!”
Don was sprawled on the floor of the kitchen, making loud snoring sounds. He had a bottle of aspirin in his hand, and he’d got one of them into his mouth; I could see the white residue on his chin. I couldn’t make him hear me. I felt a great and rising panic---I assumed he’d had a stroke----but I sat there talking to him, telling him that the ambulance was on the way and that I’d be there for him. I don’t know what I said, actually.
It was an aneurysm, a definitive cerebral hemorrhage that flooded his brain and ensured, almost from the start that he was going to end up dead or dead for all practical purposes. But the neurosurgeon in the ER said that they could operate, but that I had to decide right away. While he was telling me my options, he was just perceptibly shaking his head. “It’s unlikely he’ll ever be fully functional again,” he said. “This isn’t like an ordinary stroke.”
If we operated, was there a chance that he might have the use of his faculties? Would he be able to walk or to speak? Was that even possible? They wouldn’t say yes or no. Strong likelihood that he would be completely inert, capable of feeling pain perhaps, but not of much else. I couldn’t decide. “You have to decide now,” said the doctor. Fortunately, my friends John and Lee were with me. “I have never heard a doctor be clearer,” Lee told me. “You have to let him go. You know Don. He wouldn’t like those chances.”
My brother is a pathologist and used to be an ER doc. After appropriate authorization, he made a couple of telephone calls. “I don’t think surgery is a realistic option,” he told me gently. And, “Amy and I are on the way down there. Hang on.”
After that, there was just the interval during which we were waiting for him to die. The organ donor people were all over it before the day was over (and I think their work is vital and I know that Don would have wanted it, but they should have told me that keeping him alive in the ICU for the remaining five days that he continued to live would be completely at my expense.) So I had him hooked up to a respirator. By the end of the day, he was effectively gone. The doctor scraped the sole of his foot with a comb and his toes fanned out---the last thing he ever did on his own. “That’s not good,” said the doctor. “That’s a reflex you in infants. The higher brain centers are gone now. If we operated, he might go on living, but he’d be a plant.”
He said this because I wanted to know if it would be comforting to Don in any way if I were to sit with him. “Nothing there,” he said. He wasn’t the tactful sort. But it’s the same thing my brother told me when he arrived.
“Don’t sit there,” my sister-in-law urged me. “He doesn't know. You don’t want to remember him this way.”
“It may take him a couple of days to die,” said my brother. The idea was that we would keep him hooked up to the respirator till he died on his own. If we took him off it, he would have a heart attack and his heart wouldn’t be available to the organ donor people. “Don’t sit here,” my brother said. “He’s not there. By now---" This was late the following day--- "the receptors are all gone. He’s only breathing because of the respirator. He can't hear you or know you're there----nothing's left.”
He didn’t look at that stage as if he were effectively dead. He looked as if he were very peacefully asleep. When I touched his hands, they remained inert, but they were warm. After I'd been there awhile though, the lack of any connection began to tear at me. His insensibility seemed like an affront. I felt abandoned, forgotten, cancelled out. It was that more than anything that made me decide I couldn't sit in that room watching his body die. The part of him that mattered had disappeared from that room the first day.
It was only away from that room that I started to feel re-connected. I think a lot of people who have lost a spouse or a family member will know what I am talking about. There's a period of time---it doesn't go on forever---when you have the sense that the 'departed' is anything but that. During that intial time, it's as if the person is still somewhere close by, out of sight, but not out of hearing. It's a profound sense of concentrated presence. Is it wishful thinking? I personally think not, but I also don't think it matters.
A few days before, he had said to me---apropos of nothing---“If something happened to me, I don’t know what you’d do. I don’t know who’d look after you. Rumcove wouldn’t be any use to you; I know you’re good friends but I don’t think you could count on him if something happened to me.”
Alarmed, I said, “What do you mean? Is something going to happen to you?”
He went on looking serious, but then he laughed and shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
But did he know differently at some level? He and I always had a very weird psychic bond; during our seven years of marriage, we had a lot of trivial but very strange shared perceptions. Don believed that he had ESP and he believed in ghosts and visions, though he didn’t talk about it much. I didn’t believe in any of it, but I had a few odd experiences all the same.
One of them was the next day. I woke up with a gasp of terror; I had suddenly had the strongest feeling that I was being watched. Avidly watched. When I opened my eyes, I thought for one confused second that three hooded figures were leaning over the bed looking down at me before they resolved themselves into three bathrobes hanging on hooks on the bedroom door. Three robes that were always there.
“What’s the matter?” Don said. He was already awake. I laughed sheepishly. “The robes on the door---“ I said, gesturing. “I know,” said Don calmly. “I saw them too. They woke me up too. It gave me a bad feeling.”
I laughed about it then, and it is too ridiculous to take seriously, but it still bothers me to remember it. Could he have known something and could I somehow have picked up on his knowledge or fear? The doctor told me afterward that the brain can start to bleed very slowly and that the seepage can definitely affect the person’s mood. Could he have known at some level?
In his own way, Don was a very spiritual person. He believed in a spirit realm. He claimed (not more than a dozen times in our lives, but at least that many times) that he could sense the presence of spirits and he said that he received messages from them. During one of our conversations, he said, “For example, there’s a spirit here now,” and instantly, all the flames of all the candles in the room---we’d had a candlelight dinner and we both found candlelight relaxing---started to waver. Why? We were indoors; there weren’t any drafts. “Don’t say that,” I said, shivering. “Why not? It’s quite harmless,” he said matter of factly. “Some are malevolent, but this one isn’t."
When I accused him of trying to frighten me, he clammed up and when I pressed him, he said rather angrily that he didn't want to talk about it anymore. People who can sense these things aren’t supposed to talk about them, he said.
For awhile we lived in an apartment where everyone in the family was always uneasy. Why? It was just an apartment---and in fact, the nicest one I’d ever had. But nobody slept well there and we all at various times would get up in the night to see who was in the living room, walking back and forth. There was never anyone there and when you got up to look, there was never any noise either. Weird.
I had one (but only one) terrible, restless night in that apartment. All night long, I was tossing and turning because of an absolutely unshakeable feeling that there was someone standing in the room, directly across from the bed. It was just a feeling; I can’t explain it. When I looked, there was no one there. The next morning, when Don woke up, I said, “I couldn’t sleep at all last night.”
“I know,” he said soberly. “There was somebody in the room all night long, standing there—“ pointing to the exact spot. Of course I questioned him about this---I was frightened; I don’t mind admitting it----but he wouldn’t or couldn’t answer my questions and he wasn’t even particularly interested or bothered. “I don’t know; whatever it was, it’s gone now anyway,” was all he’d say. “It’s better not to get involved.”
But it’s not exactly surprising to me that after he was dead, he seemed (and seems) to have persisted. Immediately afterward, I had a number of experiences that I might, if I weren’t afraid of sounding insane, attribute to his having found some way to make his presence felt. I think a lot of widows have similar experiences and maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but there was something particularly pointed and tangible (that’s not the right word) about mine.
While he was still engaged in dying, my brother took me to see a friend who was a professional bereavement counselor. I couldn’t focus; I could barely speak. She had a candle in her office; I was staring at it because it was there; I’d had a lot of Ativan and was feeling hazy and numb. Suddenly, as I watched, the flame started wavering madly. It was actually flickering. “Look,” I said. They all stopped talking and looked at me. “No,” I said, “at the candle.” They looked at it. “That’s Don,” I announced. I didn’t believe it myself; I still don’t really, in the sense of intellectual belief, but at the time I wanted to believe it. “Stop doing that for a minute, Don,” I said. The candle stopped flickering. “Do it again,” I said and it started again. “See?” I said. “He’s here now. He’s not back there in the hospital. He’s right here.”
Sure, sure, sure, they assured me, looking at me compassionately. Yes, they could see it too. I don’t know if they did or didn’t. I think if they had they’d have been more frightened or at least more taken aback than they seemed. I don’t even know anymore what I saw or told myself I was seeing. I was tranquilized, numb, stunned. I was also unhinged---though tranquilly at that point---by grief. I wasn’t exactly thinking clearly.
But then a few days later, I was alone in my house for the very first weekend without him, I wandered around aimlessly, looking at things. I mean I was making myself look at things. You have to do that. Here is his wallet, here are his shoes; here is the last shirt he wore the last time he ever dressed----all that. I went to his closet and opened the door. He had a lot of clothes. I stood there looking at them, thinking that I couldn’t deal with them any time soon. I knew he’d want his things to go to charity---he was always very generous to the homeless and people down on their luck----but I just didn’t feel I could deal with them at that moment.
And at that moment the whole rack went crashing to the floor, scattering shirts, ties, trousers, and shoes in a tangled heap at my feet. I stared down at them, open-mouthed, and then slowly began pikcing them up, shivering. I couldn’t leave the things lying there on the floor because I couldn't close the door and, try as I might, I couldn’t get the rack to go back where it had been before. I gathered the clothes up, except for the things I particularly wanted to keep----certain of his neckties and some things I thought his kids might like---and called up a charity shop where a family acquaintance volunteered. I could tell he thought I was being precipitate about getting rid of Don’s things, but I didn’t feel like explaining. I just felt very sure that that’s what Don wanted. And I was pretty sure he wanted it, for whatever reason, right then. And I had the strongest and most terrifying and yet at the same time most comforting feeling that he was right there watching me.
A friend of mine---someone who can be madly matter of fact--came to stay with me after his memorial service. The next day she said, in that very matter of fact tone of voice, “Don woke me up last night. I’m sure he was there. He was looking for you, I think---he didn’t expect to find me sleeping in his bed instead. But he asked me if I wanted a drink. Well, that’s Don, right?”
So I don’t know. Is there a part of a human being that can be disconnected from the body? Do some people get the option of hanging about for awhile after the body is gone to take care of their unfinished business? If so, I am pretty sure he would do that---he left a lot undone.
And I have to say, absurd as it sounds, I hope it is true. I don’t think it’s wrong to want to believe, even if it isn’t quite credible, that love lasts and that death is just the dash between one incomplete thought and the next.
RELATED POSTINGS
Friendly and Unfriendly Ghosts.
The False Nostalgia Syndrome.
How Donne Missed the Point.
The Ghost in the Image: Photography and Memory.
Thanatology 101---The Need for an Etiquette of Dying.
Animation (c) 2006 Jupiterimages; used pursuant to license.
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