Grief Ghosts

People are well-meaning. This isn’t a research-based statement of fact, but rather one culled from personal experience. When well-meaning people—relatives, exes, friends, and friends of friends—found out my brother died, they reached out seeking commiseration, and I was happy for it. Often, their support included one of two phrases: “I can’t imagine what you’re going through,” or “I can’t imagine the pain you must feel.” What I found was that the opposite was true. They can imagine. The trauma, the devastation, the rage—all of it. But it’s easier for well-meaning people to avoid those feelings, to bury them for another day, another year, another life. But should we bury our feelings and memories? Or do we try and find a place for them?

I lost my mother unexpectedly from a stroke in 2013; that was pain I would have avoided at all costs if I’d had a choice. But death never asks for permission, it simply shows up unannounced and takes what it wants. My stepfather’s health started to deteriorate the moment my mother died. His passing wasn’t sudden like my mother’s, but rather, was an eight-year progression. He finally joined her in 2021. We weren’t surprised, and even though he remarried—apparently men of a certain age don’t like being alone—he always referred to her as the love of his life, sometimes in front of his new wife.

A year later, in 2022, my sister, Michelle, called me from Florida at 5:30 in the morning Los Angeles time, crying. “It’s just you and me now,” she said. On a Friday morning in November, we learned our brother Mark was dead. I think about her words every day. They’re all I have. Well, along with that pain people can’t imagine having, can’t imagine going through. But along with shock and sadness, I have something else. Ghosts. His ghost. And he doesn’t just haunt my sleep dreams.

Mark’s ghost first visited me when I went to his home in Pensacola. I sat in his Jetta, waiting for my sister to load the last of his things. When I completed my MFA the summer before he died, I chose a “walk song” for graduation to commemorate the moment. Mine was “Moving On Up” by Primal Scream. I never mentioned to Mark I had chosen it, but when I got into his car and turned on the ignition, that song blasted out of the speakers. My sister and I cried when we drove away, my brother’s entire life packed in the trunk of his Jetta. I listened to the song often before his death, the lyrics affirming the path I chose to become a writer, “I was lost, now I’m found. I’m movin’ on up now; I’m movin’ out of the darkness. My light shines on.” But those words mean something different now, not so much about me moving on up after graduation, starting a new life as a writer but instead, that he’s moved on and I need to learn to live without his physical presence. But, if I kept the song on repeat, I magically think, maybe one day he might pull into my driveway blasting it, his headlights shining on in the darkness.

His ghost once arrived in a wave of regret while I sat, writing at my computer. Staring at a rough draft of something, my mind wandered to Pensacola and the days immediately following his death. While my sister and I packed up his things, I found several pairs of his prescription eyeglasses. In the moment, I decided to throw them away. I regret that decision. How could I have thrown away my own brother’s glasses? I wish I had them. To see what he saw. You should have kept them, said my inner voice, shaming me. And then I remembered.

His roommate said he found Mark lying on his side in front of the kitchen sink, his nose broken from his fall. I immediately saw the color of his hair, his eyebrows, his lashes—strawberry blonde. Truly, it was. His was that type of blonde with an orange tint that in the right light, shone like sunstone. We used to tease him about his eyelashes, they were so long, they hit the lens of his glasses. When he was ten, he trimmed them with scissors from the junk drawer, and they never grew back as long. If I hadn’t thrown away his glasses, I could hold them in my hand, maybe conjure an eyelash on my finger and wish him back—just blow.

The next time his ghost appeared, it was during a drive to the mall. “Bros” by Wolf Alice blared over the noise of the traffic. I had never paid attention to the lyrics, but on that day, sitting at a red light, I heard the words as clearly as if they’d been closed captioned on the windshield. “Are your lights on? Are your lights still on?” The words triggered the memory of me sitting in the passenger seat of Mark’s Honda Prelude driving to Gainesville to visit the University of Florida. We played 10,000 Maniacs’ “In My Tribe” over and over, singing at the top of our lungs. I held the cassette tape cover in my hands, reading along with the lyrics. Mark didn’t need the words; he knew them by heart. For the rest of the drive, we listened to The Smiths, The Replacements, and Elvis Costello. I thought about how I hadn’t ever thought of him in the driver’s seat—of the Prelude, or any car, much less in life. And maybe that was the point, he wanted me to know he was in control now, he was driving. Free. I wished I could drive past the mall, back to Florida, back to when Mark was eighteen and full of life, back to when we listened to music together. Maybe I’d find him on one of those long back roads, lost in the lyrics of his favorite music.

The time his ghost hit the hardest, I needed to lie down. I had just returned home from making Mark’s final arrangements in Florida. It was the day before Thanksgiving, and I was prepping the turkey, taking my hand out of the carcass to grab a dish towel when his ghost appeared, clearer than ever.

Mark was three and wearing a dish towel diaper when a policeman found him on the side of State Road 436. The dish towel had fuzzy, fringed ends. One side was soft velour with a burgundy seventies flowery pattern and the other a rougher terry cloth. We used it when we ran out of diapers, fastening it on his tiny body with giant safety pins. My mother worked the night shift and slept for a few hours in the morning while my brother watched Sesame Street and The Electric Company on PBS. That morning, he decided “to go see Lori and Shelly,” at school. I stood in my kitchen, gripping the dish towel, feeling heartbroken and guilty. The guilt slid down my spine and my knees buckled. I wished I hadn’t decided to move to Los Angeles, so far away. I wished I had lived closer so that when he looked, maybe he would have been able to find me.

My brother wasn’t fine. His entire adult life, he wasn’t fine. I imagine it started on that long road in Orlando where the police picked him up. Somehow, he, a toddler, led them back to our home to knock on the door and return him to our mother. Years later, we laughed about that event and how lucky we were our mother didn’t get hauled off to jail for child endangerment. It was the seventies. Mark swore he didn’t remember any of it. And I often wonder what I don’t remember. What have I blocked out? What was hidden under our laughter? What must my brother have thought about his care and safety? And what must my mother have felt about her mothering? Did my sister share the same guilt I felt that our baby brother loved us so much that he risked his little life to find us?

Mark struggled. Maybe it was because of the time, also when he was three, when he got electrocuted and had to go to the hospital. I sat on my mother’s bed, coloring while she dressed. Mark crawled around on the floor. One of my crayons rolled off the bed into the small space between the bed and the wall. Mark had crawled into that space and was shaking, the live lamp cord in his mouth. The next thing I remember was sitting on my mother’s lap, the doctor giving me a shot, “This should help big sister calm down,” he said. Mark had a scar on the right side of his upper lip from the accident the rest of his life.

Maybe it was our parents’ divorce. According to the courts, my sister and I were old enough to decide for ourselves whether or not we wanted to spend weekends with our biological father. We did not. But Mark, seven at the time, had mandated visitation. My mother fretted for years about it. He would come home from a weekend with our father and cry in his bed, holding the 8x10 picture of his dad he kept on his nightstand. He was a child, confused. He was aware, as much as any child could be, of the physical abuse our biological father inflicted on our mother, and that the violence didn’t stop after the divorce. Mark got an earful of nasty vindictiveness every weekend. “Your whore mother this and your bitch sisters that.” “I didn’t want the divorce, it’s all your mother’s fault.” On and on until he was twelve. Then our father moved overseas for a government job in security. Mark was never able to acknowledge the trauma of those years.

My brother was a seeker. Always searching. He was our rock and our alternative perspective. He looked for the deeper meaning in everything and reminded my sister and me to do the same. Maybe that’s why he was drawn to the practice of yoga, it offered peace that might otherwise have eluded him. Maybe that’s why he was drawn to making music, the rhythm of the beat grounded him. And maybe that was why he was in and out of rehab, in and out of sobriety; he saw his disease allowed him to explore the questions of his past. Maybe now he’ll find the answers.

Whether or not spirituality is part of one’s daily practice, no matter one’s belief system, or if one believes in ghosts or not, the dead do speak to the living. And ghosts don’t have to haunt. They can illuminate. And reveal. And comfort. From Patty Griffin’s album, Living with Ghosts, in the song Every Little Bit, she sings, “There’s nothin’ here but the shadow. It’s cold living with ghosts.” And I suppose that’s one way to look at loss and grief. We can’t embrace an apparition. Or hold a discussion with one. But she also sings, “I am able, in all of my travels, to make these memories quit. But tonight I clearly recall every little bit.” This is where I am now with the memories of my brother that come and go, I do want to recall every little bit of him. I’m of the mind that if we can embrace memories when they choose to float in and out of our consciousness, to accept that maybe the memories appear exactly when we need them, that they live inside us, and not outside in a scrapbook or social media feed, surely those are the kind of ghosts we can learn to live with.

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