What We Lose(17)

With each stroke and crack, tears came, until they flooded out the center of the headrest. When she stood over me, my tears dripped onto her bare foot, and she lifted my head. I told her that it wasn’t long ago, what happened. She hugged me. Reedy instrumental music played in the background. My towel fell away from my chest. She rocked me back and forth like my mother used to. Her body was hard and toned, and I cried because I would never feel my mother’s big soft breast again.



Unexpected events—UFOs, ghosts—can be explained by subjective experience. A person has lost a pet and is distracted with loneliness day after day. She is so sad over the cat’s death that she doesn’t leave the house and can only stay indoors, thinking about the way the cat used to dart across the floor, from couch to table to armchair, and under the windowsill.

One day, she is sitting and watching the window in her living room, thinking of the cat. The curtain covers a window that is thin and leaky, and outside the sky is gray, brewing a thunderstorm. She can hear the wind whistling, and it makes her think of the days she would sit inside, shielded from the cold, with the cat curled peacefully on her lap. She sees the curtain flutter, and thinks of the way the cat would walk on the windowsill and flutter the curtains in the same exact way. This could easily be explained by the wind, but because her mind is overwhelmed with grief for her lost companion, she imagines, convinced, that it is the spirit of the cat.



A ghost is not a fact in itself; rather, it is a symbol for a need. The most important aspect of the ghost is the need that creates it. The cat-ghost is a symbol of the woman’s grief.





A series of small miracles started to happen around us. A South African friend who worked at my mom’s hospital received a long-prayed-for promotion that he often went to my mother for advice about. Two weeks after my mother’s funeral, after a months-long wait, a cousin who had suffered as an undocumented immigrant for twelve years finally received approval for her green card. Both people credited these events as gifts sent to them by my mother from heaven.

Aminah and Frank took a long-planned vacation to Vietnam a month to the day after my mother’s funeral. Two days before they left, I cleared out the downstairs storage closet. Aminah called on her way to Best Buy to purchase a new DSLR camera for the trip.

“Frank wants to take pictures of the temples, with all the intricate carvings,” she told me.

I was going through my mother’s old things. It was a mix of old jackets, work papers, and her beloved kitchen tools. Not five minutes after I hung up the phone, I came across an old Sharper Image box, unopened. She often fell for the siren song of the pictures in the retailer’s catalog and the ease of automated ordering by phone. She would order gadget after gadget and stow them in the downstairs closet still in their boxes, forgetting that she’d bought them. Inside the box was a brand-new DSLR camera, still in the plastic. I called up Aminah and she came over right away to borrow it.

On their trip, Frank proposed to Aminah in front of a temple, and after she accepted, they posed for a picture, with her ring finger to the camera to show off the diamond. A local boy pressed the shutter button of my mom’s camera.

There is the logical conclusion: My family and friends experienced a string of positive coincidences at this particular time in our lives. Then there is the supernatural one, which we chose to believe—my mother, or the power of the universe in recognition of her death, influenced a positive outcome in each of these events to better us.

I made the choice to believe in my mother’s spirit. I chose to create a ghost, for the purpose of my own comfort. It made me happy to think that my mother still existed somewhere and that she could help us right after her passing.

Skepticism says that ghosts are merely unexplained phenomena. In our culture, “unexplained” = “explained as a ghost.”

Whether or not ghosts exist is beside the point. The methods relied upon for their proof are all shoddy, and even in the most certain of circumstances explanations are too easily disproved, subverted by one’s subjectivity. The woman created the cat-ghost out of the moving curtains.



My theory is that loneliness creates the feeling of haunting.

I did my best to wake up while my father was leaving the house. I thought that if I could be up by six thirty, and see him even for a few minutes, I would feel less lonely, terrified as I was by the emptiness of their airy apartment. The antique furniture, the African artifacts and trinkets carefully chosen by my mother’s hand . . . they all seemed to breathe and sigh her name. I hoped seeing his face would make the house not feel so large, the empty space not so enervating.

But I tossed at night, every night, until the early morning, and with nowhere to be the next day, I was never awake before noon.

As soon as I got out of the shower, I packed a book in my bag and headed to my coffee shop for breakfast. I dawdled and stalled, ordering coffee upon coffee so that I wouldn’t have to go home. I read the question on the baristas’ faces: Doesn’t she have somewhere else to be? When the coffee shop closed, I would finally leave and spend the rest of the day cruising around the city in my car until it was time for my father to come home from work. Then I returned home, exhausted and lonely.

The things seemed to happen only during the day, when the apartment was empty except for me. The thermostat found itself all the way up at 73, the temperature my mother liked, too hot for me or my father. The vents puttered from the heating pipes, and it sounded just like my mother’s breath.