Actually I don’t believe in ghosts, monsters, anything supernatural. But somehow I have acquired one, a little girl-ghost. At first she appeared in my dreams, in a garden, standing between me and my therapist, wanting to hold hands. Or in a nightmare, in terrible danger, but somehow I just could not get her to understand this, to be as quiet as she could be and to come with me to safety. I couldn’t say what she was like in those dreams; innocent, I suppose, naive, just childlike. I couldn’t even say what she looked like, and I still can’t. She is out of focus, only ever glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. That is also how she came into my waking life, not exactly a ‘presence’, but a manifestation of some kind.
She lost the sweetness and innocence then, and became silent, reproachful, and desperate. I couldn’t work out what she wanted from me, although there was no doubt in my mind that she wanted something. And even though I could never quite see her clearly, there was definitely something ragged about her, something neglected. She’d sneak up on me, while I was at work, or with my family; my husband and my son, that is, I don’t really have much to do with the others anymore. The last time I saw my parents and my brother was last year, when my mother nearly died. They told me she had hours left, a couple of days perhaps. I wasn’t sure I’d get there in time. I wasn’t sure they wanted me there – the messages hadn’t exactly asked me to come, they’d sounded more like accusations: of being uncaring, of not knowing my duty. She looked small, and soft, somehow, like a child, with tousled white hair. And I found myself almost wanting to give her what she had always seemed to demand: that I look after her, take care of her, protect her. That feeling of wanting to be kind, so unfamiliar in that context, entered into battle with my grim determination, in the absence of much kindness on anyone’s part, to at least do The Right Thing, even though I had no idea what that was, was trying to work it out one tiny decision at a time.
I knitted a lot, in the hospital while we were waiting for a doctor to tell us what was happening, or while we were sitting at her bedside, watching her sleep. One of the doctors was fascinated. I think she grasped that the knitting was about keeping me sane, that I was knitting for dear life. But at the same time I kept thinking of Mme Defarge, vengeful, biding her time, knitting and watching the people she considered to be enemies go to their death. My mother didn’t die, although she didn’t completely recover either. It only took a few days after I got there before the first signs of her familiar combativeness returned, and it was dizzying, that mixture of relief that she was not dying after all, not yet, and dread that now everything would be as it had been before. I got the first flight back home I could find.
And she’d be there again, just behind my right elbow where I couldn’t quite see her, or sometimes cowering in a corner, looking up at me, silent and somehow demanding. I felt awful: whoever or whatever she was, her distress was obvious, and I hated my helplessness, hated myself for not being trustworthy enough for her. There was a lot of destructiveness hovering around, not thoughts exactly, but there in my mind; the sensation of blood oozing, warm and slightly sticky; pain that was impossible to locate or define, but very real; and other kinds of pain that wormed their way into my imagination, seeming to promise to erase that other pain. I was horrified at the thought that on some level I might want to harm her, but the destructive impulses just kept coming. Horrible urges to humiliate and degrade, to hurt, and hurt again, and hurt some more; and then to annihilate, for it all to be finally over. Her mistrust of me seemed only too justified.
There were messages from what has not been home for a very long time: more demands for my care and attention, barely articulated accusations that I am a Bad Daughter. I read them but didn’t reply. I sent a card for their anniversary.
And then I got it: It wasn’t me trying to hurt her; I was picking up her feelings about what others had done to her, and failed to do for her, then, in her time. She had been abandoned all alone in hell, frightened, hurt and helplessly raging at the terrible injustice. Despairing that no-one was helping her, that no-one seemed to care, and ashamed of what she could not understand. She didn’t even have words for her experience. All she could do was to share her terror with me, and to hope that I’d be able to figure it out.
I am trying to make peace with my ghost. I try to be there when she reaches out for me, and to honour her need for truthfulness and justice. We have not left Hell behind, and yet the voices are still lying us that it isn’t hell at all, and that by refusing to quietly stay there she is being selfish and unreasonable.
I need to listen carefully to her unspoken pain. I need to really be on her side. I need to find ways to use the energy of her anger. Or I will be nothing more than a ghost.