A Book Proposal for
Ghost Hungry: In Search of the Dead
Through Psychics, Science and Psychology
By Laura Clark
Note to Paige: Please see the note included in the Word document I sent you, explaining some of my concerns. I prefer not to publish it here.
Ghost Hungry: In Search of the Dead Through Psychics, Science and Psychology
By Laura Clark
There is nothing I want more in the world than to see a ghost. Be it sheeted, see-through, wispy or gruesome, little else would satisfy me more than to witness for myself the spectral embodiment of a person long dead. While to most, ghosts represent nothing more than a sleepless night or horror movie fodder, to me they promise the proof that there is something beyond this life, that those we loved and lost are not gone forever into the blackness of nonexistence. Seeing a ghost is the only thing that could assure me that the loss we suffer is only momentary and sure to be rectified in the next spiritual plateau.
I am on a ghost hunt.
On a summer night before my mother died, as those voracious cancer cells were proving their resistance to the chemotherapy, promising to conquer her at 52, I asked her to promise to come back. We weren’t religious and didn’t believe in a heaven, hell or anything of the sort, yet I found myself unable to bare the idea of death’s finality in regards to my own mother. I told her she had to haunt me. I wanted proof both that an afterlife exists but, most importantly, I wanted to know that she continues to see, to know, to be with me. So, she promised.
Seven years later, she’s still a no show. There have been no bumps in the night, no invisible caresses or words uttered without a speaker. After almost a decade, I’ve got nothing. Well, almost nothing. Other family members have reported better luck than I, claiming experiences with my postmortem mother through some spooky, if questionably legitimate methods. I can’t help but be offended by the idea that I am not first on Mom’s list of hauntings, especially since I was the only one to ask for it. And I’m tired of sitting around and waiting for her ghost like some teenager waiting by a silent telephone on a Friday night. So, I’ve decided to set out to find her—if she is indeed out there.
Ghost hunting for one’s deceased mother would be an eccentric ambition for a person who believes in the spirit world, in the existence of god or a life after death. That I don’t believe in any of these things makes my search nearly insane. Yet, as a skeptic I possess some things that many others like me do not: a deep desire to believe and the hope that everything I think I know is wrong.
To acquire an apparition, I’ve turned to scientists, psychologists and psychics, experts on ghosts, grief and the metaphysics of the soul. I will document my search for my mother and the afterlife while also exploring theories about what remains or doesn’t remain of a person after they take that last, long sleep. In conducting a skeptical search for the afterlife and as a way to go beyond the effervescence of anecdotes and spiritualism, I will be exploring scientific conceptions of consciousness, the soul, so-called paranormal encounters and brain functioning during “psychic” visions. Every person you meet has a different theory about the possibility of life after death—my goal, through research and fieldwork, is to find my own answers to these questions. In doing so, I hope to also find my mother.
I’m not the only one searching for ghosts these days. There are over 60 television shows on ghost hunting and the paranormal currently being produced or in syndication in America. Celebrity psychics have talk shows and worldwide tours. Nearly every town and city leads ghost tours through their streets on weekend nights. There is no question that the early 21st century has been a great time for the specter snoop. The difference between that work and mine is that, where they rely on folklore, shaky night-vision cameras and hidden microphones amidst the audience, I offer a sincere search for the unknown through empirical research and a daughter’s love.
The book will be an intriguing mix of memoir, science, history and experiential reporting. It will be moving, philosophical, descriptive and (believe it or not) humorous. It will seek to answer the question that burns within most grieving people: will we ever see the dead again?
Below is an outline of some proposed components of this work.
***
Life in Death:
I have now seen six starched deathbeds, their occupants fading quickly beneath the gleam of the hospital fluorescents, of the low, late October sun, of the frosty February morning light. I have been to eleven lily-scented funerals where I always wear the same black dress—slinky and strapless with a cardigan pulled over for modesty’s sake. I have written and given two trite eulogies. I’ve eaten countless deviled eggs and store-bought cookies and raw broccoli florets in the basements of churches all along the east coast. I’ve laughed cruelly at tearful renditions of “Knocking on Heaven’s Door.” I’ve given sympathy and I’ve received it, or tried to.
Over the past eight years, death has ruled my life. So has the sloppy, soppy clichés that go along with such a melodramatic statement. This parade of finality and mortality seems to have found its route along my front door.
By far the death that has had the greatest impact on me was my mother’s. I was eighteen when she was diagnosed with inoperable liver cancer—a strange, foreign variety seen rarely and even then only in men. That summer she had known that she was sick, felt malady itching at her skin, but had neglected to do anything about it until I, her youngest and only daughter, had been moved and settled into college. The diagnosis came a week into my freshman year; she died at home thirteen months later.
There was once a time when I was simply unable to think about my mother’s death. Even after her diagnosis, even after I watched her that last year, her wasting body curled around the books she read with a sad urgency, I could not permit my brain to traverse the possibilities of her mortality. Now, I struggle to see anything but her death, her dead. I rely on creamy Kodak pictures to remember what she was like when she was healthy. When I try to remember he scent, even though I know that she smelled like Eucerine lotion, and Trident gum and of cold, smoky places that clung to her coat as she moved through them, all that comes to me is that antiseptic smell from the oncology ward, the sterilizing swabs I applied before her morphine injections, her catheter.
I can think of nothing else that would anger my mother more than the notion that her death overshadows her life in the mind of her only daughter. If she hadn’t been cremated, I’m sure she would be rolling over in her grave. Part of my work in this book will be reviving her living memory, recalling and researching who she was as a person and who she was to me. Doing so will aid me in finding her in the afterlife, if it and she exist. Understanding her motives and personality in life may help me to identify any communications that she may be offering me from the “beyond.”
The Red Hat and Other Supposed Encounters with My Mother:
The idea of this book began with a red hat.
Years after my mother’s death, my father had still not removed her things from the house. Her shoes still stood by the front door, her jackets still hung in the mudroom. In my father’s bedroom, her glasses still sat on a nightstand as though she had only just set them down.
When my brother and his wife had their first child, they named her Elizabeth, after my mother, who was called Beth. The birth brought new life to my father’s house and soon little E, as we call her, was crawling all over the place, and so were we in an effort to make her happy by offering her anything within reach that she wanted. At one point, someone found the brimmed red hat that my mother had worn each spring hanging as it had for years by the door. It was given to E, who several times flopped the too-large form onto her head to elicit our laughs.
A year and a half after the entertainment value of the red hat had worn off, my sister-in-law’s mother, Jose, had a meeting with a well-known psychic. A believer, Jose had wanted the psychic to put her in touch with her recently dead parents but had planned to eventually bring up my mother to see if the psychic “got anything” from her. Before Jose could mention her, however, the psychic interrupted the reading by holding up a hand. “I’m hearing from a woman with a B name,” Jose recalls the psychic said. “She says to tell you that she loves it when the baby plays with her red hat.”
When this exchange was reported to me, I was first astounded, and then angry. Jose had seen E playing with my mother’s red hat once before, but surely didn’t mention the experience anywhere in proximity to this psychic. This woman had made an organic observation which now stands as one of the only pieces of evidence I have that my mom is indeed somewhere out there on the astral plane. But what the hell was she doing hanging out with some supposed medium when she knows that she has a standing appointment with her daughter?
The idea that my mother was communicating with others from the grave angered me enough to kick my passivity to the curb. Until Jose’s psychic experience, I was sure that I hadn’t heard from mom because, well, she didn’t exist beyond the ashes in that metal box we buried in a wooded cemetery. I still hoped she wasn’t, but I knew that she was gone. Yet, what Jose told me gave me a mean glimmer of hope and inspired me to seek out answers for myself, rather than wait for them to come to me.
There have been different reports from other, less reputable family members of supposed encounters with my mother’s spirit, all of which I plan to investigate within the pages of this book. Like any good detective, I want to examine all available clues while also seeking out new ones.
Believe It to See It?
What does it mean to search for ghosts without believing in them? Beyond that I might be missing a couple marbles. How will my skeptical perspective effect my investigation? And what does it say about me, about my grief, my spirituality, and my feelings for my mother, that I’m willing to expend the time and energy on an endeavor I expect to fail?
Skeptics are a contentious issue in the paranormal community. According to Dave Oester, the founder of the International Ghost Hunters Society, “Those who are negative have no place in an investigation. We are not here to prove anything to skeptics—let them find their own way in the dark. Ghosts avoid skeptics, just as I avoid them myself.” Ouch.
Oester is referring to a theme that proliferates most books on ghosts, hauntings and spiritualism: you must believe in ghosts before you can see them. According to these believers, either the skeptical brain is somehow limited in its ability to access some spiritual plane, or spooks come with a built-in bullshit detector and therefore know when the living isn’t giving the possibility of their ghostly existence enough credit. Both of these explanations sound suspect to me, but that kind of attitude, apparently, is exactly why I must find my own way in the dark.
Must I believe in ghosts before I can actually see them? Is there any credibility to the idea that one limits themselves by their own skepticism? Am I the reason that my mother’s entity hasn’t come visiting? As I proceed with my research and fieldwork, these questions will stand as core conflicts. They are questions to which I hope to find answers.
What are Ghosts? Questions of Consciousness and the Soul:
In his fourth year at seminary, my father lost his faith. Raised a strict Catholic and educated by nuns, he had endeavored to become a priest until that last year of undergrad when he began to ask questions that no one in the church would answer. He was questioning the functions, the truths of religion and was told that doing so was a sin. He couldn’t stop his inquiry and it quickly led to a newborn atheism that inspired him to leave the church and the priesthood behind. While in graduate school, as they both pursued PhDs in clinical psychology, he met my mother, a lapsed Unitarian—if there is such a thing. Together they raised my brother and I without religion or spirituality. We were told that there is no such thing as heaven, hell or an immortal soul. A humanitarian more than anything else, my mother used to tell us that what was most important was this life and what we did for others in it.
Without a religious context on which to lean, I am unable to easily subscribe to the popular idea that ghosts are souls stuck somewhere between earth and god’s paradise or punishment. So, if ghosts do exist, what are they? Luckily, scientists and philosophers have already done a good deal of work to answer that question, and I plan to incorporate their considerations into this book.
There has been a surprisingly large volume of scientific research endeavoring to prove the existence of the soul. The most famous and most contested search was conducted in the early 1900’s by surgeon and physician Duncan Mcdougall. He set up an industrial scale at the Consumptives’ Home in Dorchester, Massachusetts and placed the dying upon it with the goal of determining the measurement of the soul. He would weigh each patient while living and then again immediately after their deaths. The difference on the scale equal the weight of the soul, he said. With his first experiment on April 10, 1901, Mcdougall got a result that many after him would attempt (and fail) to replicate: the patient’s inexplicable weight loss after death was found to be three-fourths of an ounce. According to Mcdougall, the soul weighs a whole 21 grams.
Though other scientists throughout the years have indeed found there to be a loss in the weight of living creatures occurring between life and death, the results have been inconsistent and of questionable validity. However, there still appears to be some compelling evidence to suggest that there are some parts of the process of death that we do not yet fully understand.
Most compelling to me are studies done on theories of human consciousness. After all, ghosts are often thought to be intangible but thinking, feeling embodiments of their living selves, suggesting that if consciousness can endure outside of the body, it may in fact explain the existence of specters. In many ways, consciousness to the godless man is similar in function and significance as the soul to the devout man. Disappointingly, they are equally inexplicable.
According to neuropsychiatrist and author Diane Hennacy Powell, M.D., the brain and consciousness are two separate though related entities. The brain, she says, is merely an organ of the consciousness, its generator, and in studying the brain’s ability to communicate telepathically or to create “out of body experiences,” she believes that there is strong evidence suggesting that consciousness can and does function outside of the brain, at least for some people. If consciousness can exist outside of the organic brain, then it can exist beyond death, meaning that in all ways except physically, the dead still live.
In the world of psyche and cognitive theory, there are many persuasive shards of evidence suggesting that the search for ghosts is not merely a foolish foray into the cobwebbed darkness. My goal is to present this research is an accessible, conversational manner that allows both my reader and myself to best interpret its validity and relevancies.
Science’s purpose in this project isn’t just to fuel the muddled philosophical considerations of a writer who barely passed high school biology. I won’t merely be using it to quantify and qualify the existence of ghosts—I’ll also be using it as a means to find them. As I quest out into my investigation, I will be continually returning to work done by scientists on the idea of ghosts, psychic abilities and communing with the dead.
Getting to the Ghost: Through Mediums and Psychics:
When searching for the dead, who better to consult then the very people who claim to have a direct line to the other side? Interactions with mediums and psychics will be one of the driving forces of my narrative and a major component of my fieldwork.
My plan is to make visits to at least a dozen psychic/mediums with the intent to communicate with my deceased mother. Tight-lipped and armed with an audio recorder, I plan to seek out credible paranormal interactions with the dead. In doing so, I will evaluate the way in which psychics interact with their clients and how clients interact with psychics. How much of what psychics do is performance, inference, manipulation? How much of “successful readings” is the product of the client’s own interpretations as dictated by their emotional needs? Through my own experience and with the help of a critical eye, I will seek explanations for accuracies and inaccuracies emerging from the medium/psychic session.
Turning to supposed mediums for answers means that I will need to first qualify what makes a good psychic/medium and how one can be identified. Rather than just blindly seeking out any mystic who will speak with me, I want to find subjects who are genuine in their beliefs in themselves. Through research on theories surrounding extrasensory perceptions and interviews with those better versed in the psychic scene than I am, I will try to find the qualities present in an “authentic” medium and try to create a method for recognizing such people.
I will also need to obtain a better understanding of the subculture of this unique community. Who becomes a psychic/medium and why? How do they explain their own capabilities? How do they visualize the afterlife and in what context do they rationalize their role in this cosmic game?
Beyond speaking with subjects following a paid psychic reading, I also plan to make a pilgrimage to the Lily Dale Assembly, a commune of mediums in upstate New York, which, according to its website, “has been the world’s largest center for spiritual development and the practice of the Spiritualist religion” since 1879. In the summer months, the residents of Lily Dale offer outsiders mediumship demonstrations and healing services along with a variety of activities that include services held at “Inspiration Stump” and a browse through the Lily Dale Bookstore/Souvenir Shop. I intend to spend time there exploring the culture of the commune and its various mediums along with the experiences and rationale of those single-sighters who, like me, have come for answers. With any luck and all of those psychics running around, perhaps I’ll make contact with my mother.
Getting to the Ghost: Through Psychology:
Since 1995 a new therapy has emerged amidst psychologists and psychiatrists working to heal people with grief and post-traumatic stress syndrome. It is a therapy that gives patients a chance to go deep inside themselves to negotiate with issues that they find too difficult to deal with in their normal consciousness. It gives people an opportunity to speak with the dead.
Developed by Allan L. Botkin, Psy.D., Induced After Death Communication is a therapeutic technique born through work with veterans of the Vietnam War. By placing his patients in a deep, near-hypnotic state, the therapy allows the grieving to witness or produce within their own consciousness a meeting with the dead in which they can converse, reconnect and resolve lingering issues.
Many patients claim that their interactions are wholly real and deeply beneficial. Yet, there is a dispute amidst participants, psychologists and scientists about what is really taking place as patients lean back on the therapist’s couch. Some believe that the hypnosis enables the brain access to a dimension or sphere in which the dead inhabit, meaning that patients of Induced After Death Communication are actually talking to the dead. Others believe that the practice merely removes inhibitions enough so that deeper emotions or repressed memories are more readily accessible and therefore easier to understand and deal with. Still others propose that during Dr. Botkin’s therapy the brain or consciousness is functioning in a different, currently undetermined mode that is specially meant to aid in dealing with grief or trauma. It isn’t clear what, exactly, is happening, but most patients are sure of one thing: it works.
Did I mention already that I was raised by two psychologists? I used to joke with friends that I had been forced to see two shrinks everyday since I was born. My parents were forensic psychologists at that, the kind of shrinks that trek into jail cells and lawyers offices to evaluate murderers, molesters and others accused of crimes they hope to be absolved of through the insanity defense. We were a family of talkers, analyzers, deep thinkers. Whereas most of the world grew up skeptical about the concept of therapy or the validity of psychological practices, we discussed the mysterious inner workings of the brain and human emotions with the utmost seriousness.
With this background, I find myself open to the idea that somewhere within the recesses of our psyches is the capability to commune in some meaningful way with those gone but still deeply a part of us. Though, I can’t say that I believe such practices truly allow for actual communication with the dead. Amidst my psychic reconnaissance missions, I aim to try out Induced After Death Communication with a qualified psychologist of whom I am already in touch. Whether I end up conversing with my mother or just myself, I am sure that I will find some shade of an answer to my questions about the existence of ghosts and our ability to communicate with them.
***
Beyond science, skepticism and ghost hunting, this book is about my relationship with my mother. It is about dealing with grief by seeking answers to unanswerable questions. It is about how we remain connected with those we loved and lost.
This book is also about the way modern culture confronts death and its implications. For some, the notion that the dead are hanging out somewhere in the clouds or bumping around the abandoned house down the street is comforting and real. For others, this idea poses more questions than answers. Humans have been talking about ghosts since before 2500 BC, when one of the first recorded mentioning of the afterlife appears in the Sumerian text, the Epic of Gilgamesh. For centuries since, the existence of ghosts and an afterlife were largely taken as mundane fact, but since religion took a backseat to reason, these assumptions are no longer taken for granted. Just as people once sought to prove the existence of germs over humors or the truth behind the idea that life thrives on Mars, we now seek to find truth in the concept that there is an afterlife.
Others before me have written about ghosts and the science behind the supernatural, but no one has ever written about it as I will, from a perspective of self-exploration and memoir. In 2005, Mary Roach published Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, a well-received book similar to mine in its ambition to seek the fact behind supernatural fiction, but wholly different in that it approaches overviews of the subject with a light-hearted indifference. Whereas I have an investment in my exploration, Roach seemed to be just along for the ride. Consequently, Spook is fun and fascinating but lacks the depth I plan to bring. Beyond Roach’s book, I have been unable to find a published project similar to mine in objective, perspective or method.
As has long been noted, death is a hot topic in today’s publishing market. With our military engaged in one and a half active wars, the economy on a torturous tour of red and black and American politicians at an all-time efficacy low, uncertainty is at a high and like me, people are looking for answers to difficult questions. Separately, the baby-boomer generation is ailing and dying, meaning that many other daughters and sons are missing their parents and wondering what awaits them beyond this life. This is an age of questions, but unlike any time before it, we have the scientific and theoretical advancements to attempt meaningful answers. This book is a part of that attempt.
I am uniquely qualified to write this book. I am the victim of a life-long obsession with all things ghostly—my personal library of poorly written ghost story books and volumes on the paranormal and ghost hunting spans several shelves. In addition to writing and modestly publishing memoir for nearly a decade, I have a background in investigative journalism through my tenures as editor at several publications in the American southeast. I received a BA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College, spent a year studying medical history and sociology at Oxford University in England, and am currently pursuing an MFA in Nonfiction from the University of Pittsburgh.
Most consequential, however, is the fact that I have lived this story since my mother’s diagnosis in 2003. My solitary search for ghosts and the emotional and spiritual stakes I bring to it are mine alone. As a writer and a person, I am sensitive, thoughtful and curious. I am a person already haunted—by memories of my mother, by grief, by my need for answers. Not just for myself, but also for others dealing with similar difficulties, this book is my attempt to find the ghost in hopes to cure the haunting.
***
Proof
[This is the first draft of the supplementary essay I mention in the Note. It is of the same subject matter as Ghost Hungry, but I’m, as of yet, unsure of where it will fit.]
Dad was admitted into the intensive care unit two days before the seven-year anniversary of my mother’s death. While preparing for bed that night, as he lowered himself down onto the empty expansive of mattress that was once her side of the bed, he was struck by a stabbing, throbbing pain on his abdomen’s left side. He was sure it was a heart attack, but once the doctors slid him through the white gaping throat of the MRI machine, we were told that the problem lay several inches south. It was his spleen, the doctors explained. In the spleen’s right hemisphere lay a massive blood clot that was starving the purple organ of the blood it need to function. Where the clot came from, they didn’t know. With shrugs and prescriptions for painkillers and an anticoagulant, they sent him home three days later.
I had driven out from Pittsburgh the day after he was first admitted and so was there to help Dad home from the hospital. He didn’t want to go home though, at least not right away. He wanted to go to the cemetery. We drove across town and bought a bouquet of yellow and red marigolds from a farm stand across from the CVS pharmacy where I picked up his medications. Then we turned around and drove back towards the hospital, which spread out next to the shaded inclines of Forest Hills Cemetery.
We had buried my mother in a secluded edge of the property, far from the street and between four large oak trees. There is a big, black rock there with her name on it and an empty space big enough for my father’s. Deer wander through that part of the graveyard, promptly eat the blossoms of flowers placed by stones, and birds chatter shrilly in the trees. This place is a relic, a necropolis designed in the late 1800’s when people wanted idyllic, park-like grounds to house their dead and where they could be visited on Sundays with picnics and the whole family. Consequently, Forest Hills is an abnormally beautiful cemetery. There are rolling hills and weather-stained benches staggered between the hundreds of old-growth trees. Animals thrive there like they would in a nature preserve; squirrels grow fat from funerary offerings and the nuts they bury and retrieve from the soft, ever-sinking soil. Before my mother died, dad took me there on walks. “This is what it looked like before this city was settled,” he would explain as we strode through the corroding wrought iron gates. I would close my eyes and try to imagine the place without the leaning rows of tombstones and the peaks of obelisks standing just over the crests of hills.
When we got to my mother’s marker, I parked the car and watched worriedly as my father winced his way out of the passenger side still weak and hurting from the part of the spleen the clot had killed. I took the marigolds out of their wrapper and placed them at the foot of the tombstone; Dad was too stiff to bend that far. Then we stood there, silent and starring. Just as on that day seven years before, we had nothing to say. Dad shifted on his feet uncomfortably and when I looked up at him, I saw that he was crying. His tears were no surprise to me; he has been leaking them ever since her cancer diagnosis. I have seen him cry at her grave almost a dozen times now, but this time, I wasn’t so sure what he was crying about. He was gaunt and pale. He still wore the hospital’s plastic identity bracelet around his wrist. I couldn’t tell if he was crying for her, or for himself.
He was back in the hospital two weeks later, and this time they found that it was indeed his heart. It turned out that it had been his heart all along. Somehow in the past several months a bacterial infection had wormed its way into his blood stream, looped the passages and throughways of his veins and arteries and then settled in his heart and made a home there. The bacteria feasted away at the soft muscle and nestled onto his arterial valve, eating a hole in it so that blood sloshed between his ventricles rather than being pushed and propelled to other parts of his body. The infection caused pieces of his heart to deteriorate and fall off, to travel out and beyond to vital organs. That is where the clot in his spleen came from—it was a part of his heart that had broken and fled.
He will need open heart surgery to repair the valve. He will need a splenectomy to remove the diseased parts of that organ. He will need six months of intravenous antibiotics. He will need at least a year of recuperation.
At the same time that this is happening with my father, I am starting work on a new manuscript, a combination of memoir and investigation. It is a piece about my mother, about her death and my motivation to seek her out in the afterlife, to try to communicate with her ghost, if they and it exists. It intermittently feels to me like a brilliant and then a brainless endeavor. Despite my expanding library of ghost story books and penchant for silly horror movies and paranormal TV shows, I’ve always wanted to, but never have believed in ghosts. I’m one of those see-to-believe kind of people and after a number of haunted house stays and Ouija board sessions, I haven’t seen a thing.
Now, with a project that demands I start a ghost hunt in earnest, I’m starting to let my imagination and hopes get the best of me. I’m researching neurological explanations for psychic phenomena and scientific tests meant to qualify and quantify the existence of the human soul. I’ve become immersed in credible reports of full-bodied apparitions, precognition, evocations of the dead. In the midst of this research, I have permitted myself to consider seriously that ghosts, that souls, exist or may exist. It began to seem possible, if even just slightly, that I could seek Mom out from whatever celestial cubbyhole her immortal consciousness may be hiding.
Yet, the more I make the early-morning trip back to Michigan to care for my father between my classes and coursework the more it feels like I am being reminded of reality. Things are bad. My father is desperate, ill and terrified; being the only family within a thousand miles, I’m wearing thin from playing nurse, teacher and student at once. Both he and I need my mother more than anything else at this time, yet, despite all of the research I’ve done that suggests her appearance to be possible, she is no where, or at least not here.
On the fourth night of my father’s most recent hospital stay, I was losing the ability to hold it together. It was a day of news, of doctors and nurses filing in and out of his beeping, florescent-lit room with information that contradicted that which we had been given only moments before. One said the bacteria in his blood surely had come from colon cancer, another said that colon cancer was ruled out. One said that his heart looked strong enough to function without surgery, another said that immediate cutting must be done to ensure that he lives through the year. In between each visit, I was making phone calls to my brother and other family members, trying to keep them up-to-date on the news, attempting to portray to them a positive attitude, but with the constant flip-flopping of the medical staff, I was not only losing positivity, I was beginning to lose hope.
My father was faring no better. He was feeling sick, frustrated and abused and began to revert to childlike behavior, as one tends to do in the hospital. He crossed his arms over his chest and mouthed off to the nurses. He told his roommate to shut up and a made the woman who brought his dinner come back twice to correct his order, though he still couldn’t force an appetite. We were both beginning to come to grips with the fact that what was wrong could not be fixed quickly, that what was wrong might not ever be fixed. By nine-thirty that night, Dad finally convinced me to go home for some sleep.
By the time I hit the elevator, I was crying and could not stop, but I had the whole expanse of the hospital to walk before getting to my car. By the cafeteria, I ducked into the hospital chapel, which was empty and colored red by the artificial light coming in through a stained-glass shadow box hanging behind the modest pulpit. I took a seat in the back on a folding chair away from the pews. There were Bibles bookmarked for those dealing with grief and there were prayer request cards one could write, but I don’t pray, and I don’t read the Bible. Instead, I took the opportunity to weep where no one would have the guts to interrupt or ask questions. I cried until I had rid the chapel of all its tissues and then I shoved the crumpled remains in my purse and left to walk quickly to my car.
But I didn’t want to go straight home. I wanted to go to the cemetery. It was right there on the way back to Dad’s house and as I pulled into the narrow gated entrance, I realized that I had never been in Forest Hills at night. It was all blackness before me since the cemetery naturally had no lights, but close to the ground I could see the dim glow of solar-powered prayer lights that adorn some graves of the devout. They were red, orange and blue, their illumination faded so much since sunset that they could only be seen by looking in their direction, but not directly at them. I turned on my high beams and drove deeper into the property.
When I reached my mother’s grave I was crying again, but this time it was less about grief, fear and sadness, and more about anger. I was suddenly struck by rage, by a fury towards Mom for leaving us alone to deal with these things—with illness and pain and happiness and comfort—without her. How could she permit such suffering to visit us again, after we have seen so much? How could I permit myself to believe that she could ever have an influence on our lives, could ever help us again, now that she is dead?
In the still dark, I stood and wept at her stone. And while I rarely ever speak at this place, I heard myself talking to my mother, begging her to show up because I needed her, cursing her for not existing. I was soon cold and exhausted and ready for bed, so I plodded back to my car and drove out of the cemetery, away from the black stone and the hills and trees and monuments. By the time I reached the gate, I was embarrassed by my total lack of composure. By the time I reached home, I had promised myself to forget the whole experience.
The next morning when I came to my father’s hospital room he was awake and lying upright with matted hair, surrounded by the New York Times. A friend of his had visited to bring him the paper and she lingered as I drank the coffee she had also brought Dad but that he could not drink.
When the friend left, Dad watched the door close over the top of the International section and than threw down the paper and turned to me.
“I think Mom was here this morning,” he said.
My father is the source of my skepticism. In all of my life I have never met a man more critical—not of people, but of ideas, assumptions, institutions. He had dropped out of the seminary two years before becoming a Catholic priest and has since applied a thick layer of skepticism to all he reads and hears as though trying to make up for all the time he spent believing in what turned out in his eyes not to be real. He thinks my obsession with the supernatural is silly, he thinks my search for ghosts is strange. Consequently, I was shocked to hear him utter words that sounded like he was telling me that he had seen a ghost.
“What do you mean, Mom was here this morning?” I asked a little incredulously.
“I was sleeping,” he explained, “around 6:15 or 6:30 this morning, dozing in and out of wakefulness. At one point, I was aware that I was awake but my eyes were closed, and then I felt it, I felt her. It was the exact feeling of her kissing me, on the lips. Quite passionately. It lasted a good long time and then when it was over I opened my eyes and she wasn’t there. It felt so real though, so . . . exactly like it was. If I didn’t know any better, I would have sworn that she was here.” Tears were rolling down his cheeks.
“Wow,” I said, leaning back in my chair. I didn’t know how to respond. He was so earnest, so serious in telling this story. And there was an air of happiness to him as he closed his eyes to recall the exact feeling of the kiss, to relive it again as he had that morning. It was different than happiness though, it was like a relief, like he had gotten something he needed and good now rest comfortably. But I was still surprised by the notion that my father would ever report to me a paranormal encounter.
After a silence, he looked over at me. “Do you think I felt Mom’s ghost this morning?” His voice cracked as he said it.
“I don’t know, Dad. What is important is what you think.” He paused for a moment.
“I think I did,” he said slowly. “I know without a doubt that what I felt was Mom, and I know that Mom is dead, so if I felt her then it must have been her ghost.” He laid his head back on his pillow, crossed his hands over his chest and closed his eyes. “I know it was her,” he said again, and then he fell asleep.
As he slept, I considered the strangeness of the situation. Had my father truly witnessed the ghost of his wife or was he dreaming, his sub-consciousness on an extraordinary mission to relieve some of the emotional weight that his consciousness has gone into overdrive to process? Was his brain merely giving him what was needed: comfort? Or, did my temper-tantrum in the cemetery the previous night alert my mother in some way that she was needed? Did she want to restore our faith that she is indeed out there, watching us, helping us?
Despite my father’s own surprising conviction, I am unable to find answers to these questions. I still haven’t heard from her, and I am still struggling with the difficulties of Dad’s illness. It makes me wonder what I will need in order to know that she exists in some spiritual form, how much evidence and what kind will be necessary to sway this skeptic the way my father was swayed. Does it need to be a full-bodied apparition or words from beyond? Or does it need to be only the illusion of a kiss and the memory of the emotion that once came with such contact?
I am unsure. Yet every morning, as I slowly come to consciousness in those early moments lying in bed, I turn over on my back and tilt my chin, waiting for what it is I need, waiting for proof.
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