A True Ghost Story
Here's a true short ghost story (of course, ghost stories are almost always short, aren't they, even though ghosts themselves are timeless) I posted in a long comment over on stageleft's blog, if you like that sort of thing. Not blogs, I mean ghost stories. No one likes blogs. Blogs are like the crack of writing, if you ask me.
My father died when I was young. My mother was left with four little kids. Everyone I knew growing up described his death as tragic and everyone was affected in one way or another because he was a very decent person. I used to dream every once in a while that he was alive but had been living somewhere else. I was too young to remember him really but in my dreams he'd always tell me he was happy where he was, with his other family, and that he didn't want to come home. And he didn't want me to tell my mother because she wouldn't understand. It always left me with an empty feeling in the dream but when I'd wake up I'd be relieved that life was the way it was, that I wasn't supposed to live my life with my father alive, that it was supposed to be this way. My mother was a very straight forward person who had no patience for unreality so I never told her about my dream. Yet I grew up surrounded by his death. It was everywhere in our house, the house that my grandfather had built for my father and mother but that my mother had made her own with shag carpet and wallpaper. When my oldest was four, the age I was when my father died, I had a bit of a depression, I was carrying around a sadness that didn't really feel like it was mine but it was overwhelming. I had to fake my way through the day. This went on for a couple of weeks but it felt like years. One day, when we were getting ready to go to playgroup, my daughter looked at me and she was crying and she said, "you're going to die and there's nothing I can do about it". It was an existentialist thing, the same realization I had when I was eight or so, but she was only four. It was pretty young to think something like that. I felt like I was looking at myself, that I was my mother, when I told her to stop being silly and put on her snowsuit. In reality, I felt like I was being crushed by a surrounding weight. That night I had a dream that my father came to my house. We were living in Belleville at the time and he said it had been hard to find me but he'd been living with me for a couple of weeks. Then he said, "I wanted you to know what I felt. But I'm moving on now so don't look for me anymore and don't be sad." And when I woke up, I wasn't . I haven't dreamt of him since. I'm an optimist, which may mean I'm a believer, I don't know. All of my comfort in life has come from others, and I've taken comfort from believers and non-believers. To my kids I say life is a mystery. No one really knows anything.
