Ghosts

            January is almost over. It is the 29^th today. Right now I am sitting in an airport at a layover between New York and California, on my way to a Crafters Convention. I am in Atlanta, Georgia.

            I was scared to make the trip. Now that I am halfway there, I am less so.  I think one of the side effects of having lost my mom is a certainty that anything can happen to anyone at any time. Because it’s true. The horrible things that can happen to people like, Cancer or car accidents, murders, plane crashes, etc. can happen to anyone, at any time. My mom dying of cancer was something that I thought I was safe from. That was something that happened but not to me. When my mom told me she had cancer I cried. Because I thought it was terrible she would have to go through treatment and be sick, lose her hair. And we’d have to go through the fear of her fighting a deadly disease. But not because I thought she would die. 

            The thought of my plane crashing or of me being in California when the big quake hits, makes me want to stay home. The possibility that I could have to leave this life and not be able to witness Desmond’s growth and be his mom on this physical plane, every day, is enough to make me feel like I probably should not leave his side. But that is not real life I guess. I tell myself I will probably be fine and if I am not, than that is what is meant to be. I suppose.

            Becoming a mom has given me a totally new perspective on what my mom must have felt, having to leave. I don’t know where she is now. I don’t know if she sees me or not. I don’t know what that means. I exhaust myself looking for “signs” from her. The numbers on the clock, heads up coins, feathers, smelling her perfume, butterflies, a light flickering, the songs on the radio. Is that her? Could be, maybe not, I don’t know. It wears me out, hoping and looking and not knowing. I would like her to appear in my house at night in the dark, a glowing figure with her face smiling. Then I would know for sure. Or hear her voice, feel her hand on my head.

            I have always been in love with ghost stories, since I was very little. I watched Scooby Doo because there were ghosts sometimes but was always disappointed that the ghost ended up being a man in a sheet or some other equally uninteresting, explainable phenomenon. Every book I picked out at the library growing up was about ghosts. My mother desperately wanted me to read the ‘Little Women’ series. When I was 13 years old, I started to read Stephen King. She kept asking me to read Little Women. I told her to write me a ghost story. So she did. She wrote a book called ‘Stone Words’.  Then she won the Edgar Allan Poe award for mystery writers and we went to a dinner where we met Stephen King. No  kidding. I have a Polaroid somewhere of me standing with him. He was very tall and smelled like death.

            When my mom died I expected a ghost. I am still waiting. I used to watch a lot of the show Ghost Hunters on TV. Now I watch a show called Celebrity Ghost Stories, which I love. And a show called I Survived, Beyond and Back on the Discovery Channel. I believe these ghost stories to be true and the stories of people dying and coming back to life are interesting too. I guess I would have liked these shows anyway but because my mom has died, they strike a deeper note with me. I am looking for an answer, to questions about my own life and of course hers. And I find these stories highly entertaining.

            I wonder if I will see my mom again. I don’t know. I like to think I will someday. Even if it is just random brain activity after my heart stops, before I am brain dead. And I hope she is happy to see me and that she will let me hold her and she will hold me back. I keep hoping she will show up in the mean time and scare the pants off of me. And I am afraid I will have a heart attack. I am scared to walk up the stairs at night in the dark. I wish for her to appear and then add, “but don’t scare me”. I have started to imagine her standing at the bottom of the stairs as I walk up them at night, protecting me, and I feel less afraid.

            I have had things happen that I thought were real signs from her. Things that were great coincidences but still, not impossible to explain away.

            Our neighbor’s father died this past week. Joseph decided to bake cookies for the man and his wife. We walked over to their house, down the block, as a family. I had not met them before really, other than waving from afar. The wife stood with us on her back deck and pointed to some white splatters on the wood that she said were droppings from a hawk that sat in their tree for an hour the day her father-in-law passed. She went on to say she had never seen a hawk in the village before.

            It reminded me of other bird stories related to people passing. Two about my mom. One is so crazy and I wish I had written about it when it happened so that I could be sure I am remembering it correctly and could remember more detail about it. It happened shortly after she died. I had made her bedroom my own. I had come into the room from a shower, wrapped in a towel. I don’t know how it got my attention, but right outside the glass doors of the patio came a large black crow. It looked in at me. It sounded like it was talking to me. It said things like “Hi Sarah”. Or some crow like version of this. Could that be? It sounds so insane and I have told very few people that story because it is hard to believe but this is what I remember. And I thought for sure if was her or a strange and scary crow. It was the sort of thing you think, I must have imagined that. It hopped around on the deck looking in at me…

            The other story is much more believable. It happened when I was living in Long Beach on Long Island. About a year after my mom died, I sold her house and moved. I lived a block from the ocean in a small bungalow. It was a few blocks from the boardwalk. One night I jumped on my bike and rode it down the boardwalk to see a movie in town by myself. I did not know much about the movie I was seeing. I don’t remember what it was called now. Julia Stiles was the star and it was about her dancing. Her mother dies in a car accident. Maybe her name was Sarah. There were so many odd similarities and as has happened so many times since my mom’s death, I was caught off guard by the dead mother story line and flattened by it. When the movie was over, I climbed back on my bike and rode back to the boardwalk. It was a cool summer night, the boardwalk was empty and I rode my bike, crying, listening to the ocean and the wooden planks rumbling under my bicycle tires. I stopped my bike right where my friend Judy had an apartment. The boardwalk butted right up against her backyard. I wanted a friend but her lights were out. I leaned my bike against the rail and sat with my feet hanging off the edge of the boardwalk, looking out at the ocean and cried some more. I looked back towards my friend’s place and as I did a huge white swan flew directly over her roof in a straight line towards me. I had never seen a swan flying. It was so white and so big and it’s neck was so long. I could hear it’s feathers when it’s wings moved. It flew over my head and towards the ocean, made a sharp right turn and flew off down the beach. It was beautiful and it could have been a sign. It could also have been a swan flying at night. I think in that moment it did comfort me though. I had forgotten about it until this woman told me about her hawk.

            I was reminded of another Pam story the other night. I was with friends and a friend was talking about her little boy locking himself in the bathroom on accident and her panic to open the door for him. It reminded me of my mom. She loved photography and her father had also loved photography and had had some sort of make shift darkroom when she was young, if I am not mistaken, or maybe that was part of a story she made up. She wanted to make a dark room in our house so that she could develop film and print photographs. This was when cameras used real film.

            She was trying out different rooms in the house, trying to find a space that would be dark enough. I was away in college at the time and in our house at home, I had a small walk in closet in my bedroom. She went inside this closet to test it out as a dark room. She closed the door and then discovered she could not open it. She panicked thinking that she would surely starve to death and die in the closet because she lived alone and no-one would know she was in there. She banged on the door for a while and eventually it opened. She ended up making a dark room in the basement, in our laundry room.

            A year or so ago, I was visiting our old neighbors, the Feehans with Joseph and Desmond. I rarely go there. It makes me nervous to go back to the street we lived on. It is painful to see our old house. We had dinner and they suggested I go next door and knock on the door and ask to see the house again. I wanted to. So we did, Joseph, Desmond and I and Katie, the oldest of the three Feehan kids went next door. The man who bought the house answered the door; he remembered me and welcomed me in happily. My first thought was how small it seemed. I thought it had been bigger. Almost everything in the house had been altered. The kitchen had been moved around, walls knocked down, the porch out back had been turned into a den. Walls upstairs had been moved too. But my closet was the same. And the stairs up to the attic were still painted the three shades of pink. The bathroom upstairs was the same too. The same sandy brown and mint green tiles. I did not recognize the back yard. The front of the house has been changed so much too, the big holly bushes were taken out and smaller shrubs put in. The front door was replaced. I felt disappointed. I wanted to visit my old home but it wasn’t there anymore. Just some fragments were left. It was a reminder that I could really never go back.

            Sometimes when I am struggling, I think about driving “home” to that house. To sit in my car in the street in front of my old house. It’s as close as I could get to going back home.