Yo, ectoplasm! Real ghosts -- who has 'em?

I've never seen a ghost. Always wanted to, even as a callow lad, and at moments during adult life I have inwardly pleaded for the spirit of a “departed” being to make itself known. Nothing yet.

Around this time of year, though, the veil between worlds is said to grow thin – Dia De Los Muertos, Samhain, Halloween – so maybe.

The grandma who raised me was named Madeline (like the Proust cookie) but we called her Mad (like crazy, though she wasn’t). Mad conducted family seances in the front room. She and her two kids and little me joined hands in the dark and tried to summon C.V., her husband. Their father. 

C.V. had abandoned us for another woman years earlier. On a July night in 1967, after a longish decline in the hospital, he died. During what must have been the moments of his passing, Mad lay asleep in the bed they’d shared.

In a dream, he came to her. “I want to come home,” C.V. said.

Mad was indignant. “And just where do you think home is?”

He said, “Why, home is wherever you are.” 

She was about to respond to him when she was awakened by noise, an urgent fist banging on the side door of the house. One of her daughters, arriving with the news. A friend who happened to work at the hospital called when she recognized C.V.’s name on the roster.

I have no doubt this happened exactly as Mad told me.

*

People who study ghosts seem divided between two views: 

1. Ghosts are objective, actual beings, separate from mortals, who make contact with us for their own reasons. People with a proclivity for seeing them do.

2. They are split-off parts of the viewer’s psyche, a mix of repressed content and wishful thinking. Hallucination, in any case.

But why must it be either/or? We know from physics that light when measured a certain way shows as a wave, and when measured another way looks like a particle. If you see light as wave, you can’t see it as particle, and vice versa. You can, however, see light as light.

What if a ghost is neither an actual, free-standing entity apart from the mortal it visits, nor something insubstantial, churned out by the mortal’s own malfunctioned brain? What if it’s neither and both? Like light?

*

Much later as an adult I stopped by Mad’s place on the day our town’s newspaper published the obituary of the woman C.V. had run off with. I knew she would have seen it. She did, and was inconsolable. “He’s with her now,” she said.

We sat together, and the setting sun between the window blinds made slats of gold on the floor. Even the cats got quiet.

Possibly he is with her now, I remember thinking, but time in the other realm may not work as a past-present-future phenomenon. I mean, it barely works that way surefire among us fleshly clods still waiting for death, tormented as we are by memory and speculation. Time over there could be similar to light. Aren’t ghosts often described as glowing, as lit from within?

Mad is “gone” (as people like to say), too. Deceased, passed on. And her daughter who banged on the door that night. And another daughter who was my mom.

This year, I hope.