The Comfort of Ghosts

It's not only me -- everybody's haunted. How lucky we are.

Photo by Erik Müller on Unsplash

In Jamaica, I overhear my boyfriend Isac laughing in the next room. He says a few words I can’t make out. A pause. More laughing.

“What’s so funny?” I ask, when he exits.

“It’s a joke my mom makes.” His voice trails off, indicating that I wouldn’t understand and he doesn’t want to stop to explain it to me. It will break the spell. I let it go.

His mom is very funny, this I know. I often hear her witty observations via Isac’s careful imitation of her voice and mannerisms, but I’ve never met her. She died five years before we got together.

Isac told me that when his mother was dying, he explicitly asked her not to haunt him. “You don’t need to come back and visit me,” he joked and she laughed.

But deep down, I’m guessing he didn’t mean it because when we are in Jamaica, Isac always hears her voice more clearly and it comforts him. It’s not only his mother; he feels many of his ancestors while we are here, ones whose names he doesn’t even know. That was part of the allure of this place. I like to listen to ghosts and it comforts me that he can hear his, too.

I think we have this ghost thing all wrong. We should all strive to be haunted and when it finally happens, lean into it and see where it takes us.

But it’s not always pleasant. For example, my mom tells me she is being haunted.

This is nothing new. My parents’ old house has seen its fair share of ghosts. A friend of theirs, who used to live in an apartment on the main floor, used to complain about waking up to a presence on her chest that made it hard to breathe. A couple before them sensed a young girl, who would play hide and seek behind their shower curtain.

I thought about that ghost girl when my own daughter was very little, and she would walk in circles at my parent’s house, as if following someone else’s lead. I chalked it up to her imagination. Still, nearly every time I am alone in the house, I can hear the undeniable sound of footsteps making their way up the stairs.

My mom was comfortable with her ghosts. She even had a painting commissioned of her house with a ghostly image appearing in one of the corner windows.

But this ghost scares her, so I know something is off. It took a while before she admitted it was a close family friend, who died at a young age, very suddenly, just one year ago.

“Angelo is haunting my mom,” I tell Isac.

“Good,” he replies. We laugh. We both speak to Angelo. We hear his laughter. We know his humour. His friendship with my mother was strained during the last few years of his life. This is his ghostly revenge.

“He should break her window,” Isac jokes. It’s the window she insisted he install several months before he died, one which started a petty disagreement.

It took years for me to acknowledge the spirits around me. I’d catch a glimpse of something in the light. A quick movement in a mirror. A voice in my head just as I am waking up. It’s evolved from a feeling of fear to relief. I’ve lost something precious and then, when I least expect it, it appears and I’ve found it again. I would wish that joy on everyone.

“My mom would have loved you,” Isac told me once, out of the blue. I’m not sure if he heard her voice, or she his, but I can tell he’s channeling her. “But not your cooking. Definitely not your cooking.”

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