by Carolyn Myers
I have only known one ghost. I knew her briefly, yet intimately, and our encounters remain as fresh as dreams.
I lived at that time in a small rural valley, which crossed the Oregon/California border. I lived with my partner, Matthew, and another couple, Ruth and Donald, and we had toddlers of the exact same age: Uma and Tyler. I gave birth to my second daughter, Mica, in that rustic house; more specifically in the detached back room, which had ceiling and floor, but only partial walls. We covered the open space between the roof and the walls with plastic for the winter; and it was only April now. My God, we were hardy souls.
Mica was just new, maybe two days old. I went outside to pee. It was April in Oregon, so it was raining. I had torn a bit during the birth, so I was probably filling a basin with water, lowering myself and peeing in that – sorry to offend, or to make men queasy, but you ones-who-have-given-birth know what I mean – peeing can be quite a challenge that first week or so. What I want to establish is that I was wet and dripping and the plastic walls of our room were wet and dripping as well, so when I looked back toward the inside it was like looking through a semi-opaque shower curtain.
I saw someone standing over the cradle. Startled, I opened the door fast; but she didn’t move. And she didn’t look much different than she had when seen through the plastic, she was sort of undefined and water-color like, not exactly translucent, but not solid either, opaque – like a portrait painted on wet plastic.
She was lovely and very pale, with brown hair hanging around her face and a tired but sweet face, a thin upturned nose, big brown eyes. She looked vaguely familiar. She was peering down at the baby, rocking the cradle without touching it, just by intention so it seemed.
I called out at her, questioned her identity, her presence, her purpose.
She dissipated as she walked away.
A few days later, it was our first spring day. I had pulled the rocking chair out on our little front lawn and was leaning the baby back in my arms, googling at her, while Uma and Tyler played around us. Ruth was cleaning house, cooking. She came out on the lawn and gave a start: “Liz?”
I looked up questioningly: “What?”
“I saw someone, sitting right across from you, like a mirror image, sitting as if she were holding a baby too. At first I thought it was Liz. Then she disappeared.”
“Did she have long brown hair?”
“Yes.”
So we shared our stories.
Then Ruth and Donald and Tyler went to the coast for a few days. Matthew got offered a job and wanted to take it, he would be gone as well. I didn’t want him to go. I would be alone in the woods and the electric pump had broken that morning. We were arguing on the little wooden footbridge over the creek.
“There’s no car, no phone, and now no water.”
“You can carry water.”
“ I have a new baby, and a toddler. I can’t carry water.”
“You are so middle class!”
It’s really a miracle our marriage survived. Or that we survived. Those days were unbearable, magical, luxurious. We had absolutely no money. But we had richness of time and love and friendship and family in a way that seems impossible to conceive of now; and simplicity was not a utopian goal, it was just the order of the day. In that moment, however, still fighting:
“And there’s a ghost!”
“Make friends.”
So I did. She kept appearing, and I went from fear for the baby and shock at her appearance to a deep sadness for her. This ghost was suffering.
Uma, my two year old, was suffering too. With Tyler, her constant companion gone, and this mewling infant left in his place, Daddy gone, Ruth and Donald gone, mother obsessed with small baby, she was beside herself. One day, while we were digging in the garden, she buried the baby. I turned around to see only Mica’s eyes blinking out the dirt, she was completely buried. I ran off with her to a neighbor’s house, crying; we cleaned her up, licked the dirt from her eyes, as Dr. Spock recommended, she was fine; and then I thought of Uma alone. I ran back and couldn’t find her. She was curled up in the tool shed, with the new baby blanket, asleep.
We all three slept together that night, curled up in the main house. No ghost, although I thought I saw her, a dim glow of presence, out in the dark abandoned back room.
When everyone returned — Ruth, Donald and Tyler windswept from the sea, Matthew with a broken VW (soon to become a chicken coop) he had chosen instead of pay – how can I describe him then? He was so handsome and so lively and so much like Jack in the Beanstalk, “Look what I got for working a week, mom, this magic Volkswagen!” -– we talked about the ghost.
We started asking around the valley. Others had heard. “Her name was Sheryl….” “Will’s old lady….” “Lived all over the valley….” “Only lived with Will, right where you live now, less than a year….” “Planted that lilac bush though….” “That’s right, and all those daffodils coming up in your yard….” “She died in a car accident on the upper Colestin Road, went right off the road, coming home from work late one night.” “Think she was a waitress up at Callahan’s.” “Wasn’t she pregnant?” “Yeah, think I heard that.” “She looked so much like that friend of yours, Liz who used to live down the way.” “Except she had that long brown hair.”
We wanted to help her, Sheryl. Ruth went to hear a student of Edgar Cayce’s who was speaking in town. Afterwards she asked about setting a ghost free. The advice was to get rid of all her things still at the house, especially if gathered together, to dissipate them.
I talked to a Tibetan lama. He recommended addressing her directly, telling her she was dead and that she could no longer be here with the living.
We found her things in the basement. Will had been so sad, he just boxed them pell mell. There were so few things. She was young and poor like us. He still couldn’t cope, said we should just get rid of the stuff. We were careful, tried to contact who we could, passed stuff on, donated, burned, recycled, threw away. We addressed her firmly. Told her she was dead. And she left. Or, rather, she didn’t return.
This all happened 25 years ago. I can’t explain it any better now than I could then. Life has continued: beautiful, moving, comic, harsh. Tyler died when he was only 21 years old, the greatest ache of our lives. I know that his sudden death opened me in that way where everything is precious, and during those few weeks following, when I lived in pain and in a state of grace, I thought of Sheryl, the only being I have ever met after death.
I thanked her for keeping me less afraid of the dark, of the change, of death itself. What can we do with those who leave us? Only thank them.