Lately, the air feels thick with ghosts. Memories swirl around me on a regular basis, but these days I am particularly aware of their tendrils, and people and places and experiences from the past feel tangible in the air next to me.
Last week, one evening, Matt and I went to an event for the boarding school I attended, Phillips Exeter Academy. I sat, listening to the new head of school speak, and found myself choked up over and over again. It’s not a secret that I didn’t love Exeter when I was there, but it is equally as true that I respect the place more and more every year. It is where I became who I am today. In some ways I feel like I live in my life in widening circles out from that central point, that cold, dark campus in New Hampshire, those classrooms alight with thought and learning and life, those cross-country woods where I ran for so many hours, that tiny single bedroom in a house on Front Street where I lived.
I could feel the girl I was then – so full of the future, aware of all that lay ahead, nursing her first broken heart and missing home, across an ocean – pulsing in the room around me. I felt so deeply grateful for the education I have been given that I could not keep back the tears.
Later that same night, I sat on the bathroom floor with my daughter, only a couple of years younger now than the girl I was then. She wasn’t feeling well before bed, and the cold tile of the bathroom felt comforting to her. I know that feeling. We sat there, talking aimlessly about nothing and everything. I reached up and grabbed a bottle of hand lotion and asked her if I could rub her feet. She nodded with a faint smile. I rubbed her feet with the lotion, remembering in an almost blinding flash that this is what my mother did with her mother when she was in the hospital.
In the spring and summer of 1997, when my grandmother was being treated for pancreatic cancer, my mother and I would often go visit her at the hospital in Boston. More often than not, Mum would rub her mother’s feet with cream. I remember marveling at the quiet intimacy of this gesture, and here I was, without having thought about it, doing the same for my daughter. Four generations of women, united in a single small act. I felt the presence of my mother and grandmother in the quiet bathroom with us, a spiralling back and forward at the same time, something sacred pressing on us from above, from below, from all around.
The word “ghosts” has negative implications, at least for me, but lately the presence of people who are no longer bodily here feels reassuring to me. I have a vivid memory of the winter solstice, many years ago, and of watching the horizon as the sun set. I felt then the visceral presence of people I have loved who were gone (then, my grandmothers, my mother’s best friend and my second mother, Susie). I swear to you they were right there, over the horizon, catching the sun as it slipped out of my sight. I found that moment deeply affirming and comforting, and I’ve never forgotten it. That’s how I felt last week remembering my teenage self and realizing I was subconsciously repeating rituals and rites in which my own mother and grandmother participated. I was held by the past. Rather than being sad about all the ways that then threads itself through now, I felt reassured by it.
This is how grief comforts. Ghosts and tendrils of memories sweeping up around you. Tears may come but there is relief, too, in the connection between the past and present.
Uncanny, I’ve been feeling this too. When I saw the title of this post, a gentle wisp amid the shouting on Facebook, I clicked over hungrily.
So much of my life I’ve had an affinity for water, and this moment in mid-life, it almost feels as if it’s all been a jump. I am just beginning to see for the settling, emotions, people, dreams, and nightmares all fluttering around me, making more and less sense in a soothing, but also at times unsettling way.
I know full well this is making no sense, I should instead just say thank you.
Ah, so there was a piece brewing. So glad these thoughts found their way to the page. This is one of those pieces that have me pining for a longer Lindsey Mead body of work, but I’ll take what I can get. 🙂
Oh, yes. I know this longing and the revisiting of people and memories of our past. I am still working my way to finding reassurance from my “ghosts.”
What a beautiful moment to share with Grace, and to be able to recognize the spirits that surround us with their love and guidance every day is so powerful. I take such comfort in that.
Yes. Exactly. Thank you for this. xox
Fluttering is the perfect word for how this feels. I think of prayer flags fluttering in the wind, tattered, but still somehow transmitting their message. xox
This makes me smile. xoxo
I hope it comes. xox
Me too. Oh, me too. xox
My grandfather died of pancreatic cancer, so I understand the depth of your mother’s simple gesture, and yours with Grace too. So lovely how you captured the many golden links in a family’s chain.
Thank you. This is so beautiful and, if I may, is clearly from you yet sounds new in its tone. Explore that voice more.
This makes me teary, on a difficult morning. Thank you. My mother is visiting from overseas, and I have rubbed her feet just yesterday. For us it somehow creates a sacred space where we can talk, about nothing and everything, trying to bridge a gap that living on another continent and in a new stage of life has created. Now I need to go wash my face 🙂
So lovely.
Oh yes. I feel like this too. When we lived in DC, we were in an old house, and at night, I swear I saw a ghost. Now I don’t see ghosts but I feel them. And yes, some of them are my own ghosts and the ghosts of the people who used to care for me, only now I am caring for them. Ghosts all over. Thank you for writing about this. xo
I understand what you mean but ‘ghost’ does not have a negative connotation for me. Especially in this context, with your gratitude, the moment with your daughter, and the stunning description of your winter solstice. This is nothing but beauty. ????