Ghost Stories
- Jul 17, 2017
- 8 min read
by Kateri Kramer
1. In Vienna, a city of ghosts, amidst linen-colored marble, it wasn’t the unfamiliarity that discomforted me, but knowing this city of ornate architecture painted in splashes of gold and seafoam green is also the place where on a freezing November night, glass littered the streets reflecting the faces of 117,000 Jews. Their shoes crunched the glass of synagogue windows they’d never pray in again. My father never visited Vienna with me; he is dead and it’s not the 17th century. In the Baroque era, in German-speaking Europe, mourners would place oranges near the dead. At Jewish funerals, a Rabbi would recite the Mourner’s Kaddish: “May there be abundant peace from heaven, and life for us and for all Israel; and say, Amen.” A melancholy lyric call to the dead. Now there’s no time to gather oranges or say the words that are supposed to be said.
2. As my father was dying, he said he wanted orange candy, and so we gathered the small iridescent circles on his bedside table. When someone dies the bitterness of unripe oranges lingers in the back of my throat. I cannot eat oranges unless I am in the presence of a river, the ones my father cast his fly rod into. He always kept an orange in his backpack when he went fishing. When I think of it now, I remember how my father never wiped the juice from his arms, how he fished those afternoons in the muddy Colorado replacing juice with silt, how what touched his skin must mingle with the river waters I sometimes still wade through when crossing those familiar trails, my father, ghost that he is, walking with me still.
3. My sister has always believed in ghosts. One afternoon my father told her a story about seeing a ghost above the fireplace mantle of his small artist’s loft, walls clad with garage-sale paintings in mismatched frames. I have never had the patience to believe in ghosts, the waiting for a presence not of this world to appear. I have never had the patience for fly fishing either, the hours of cool river water splashing at ankles, the repetition of shoulders pulling and pushing rod into eddy. But my sister does; she is my father’s child. She is his daughter of ghost stories and lapping river water and in his death she continues to push and pull rod into eddy. I wonder if she feels him there, at the water’s edge with her. I wonder if she sees his footprints in the clay and mud of the Blue, the Platt, the Eagle. Do ghosts leave footprints? If one looks for ghosts in rapids or the sweet, hot juice of oranges, in the pages of books, can they find them?
4. Dad, I can’t find your favorite book, Bless Me, Ultima, that well-worn copy you gave me. Surely it’s tucked behind another or in the folds of a neglected backpack. But I’ve been thinking of owls and you a lot lately, and your favorite quote, the last line of the book, keeps replaying in my head as if it’s the only thing on a radio with one station: “I bless you in the name of all that is good and strong and beautiful. Always have the strength to live. Love life, and if despair enters your heart, look for me in the evenings when the wind is gentle and the owl sings in the hills. I shall be with you.” You gave me these words one day, written on a torn piece of paper in your slanted artist’s hand. I’m not sure why. Do you remember? Did you know that you wouldn’t always be able to slip me notes with the words of your favorite books? Did you give me the owl because you knew I never believed in ghosts? I want to believe. I read somewhere, sometime, someplace, that ghosts yearn to be seen. Is this why I keep seeing owls?
5. I keep seeing men who look like my father, who look like owls. Well, not really look as much as they fulfill this intense desire I have to see him moving through the world. This is strange, I think, because even now, three years after his death, I cannot look at a photograph of him. I can’t stand the feeling of being able to touch it and not feel his rough callouses on the palms of his hands or the well-worn flannel of his favorite shirt. My mother keeps all the photos of weddings at the end of the hall, the weddings of great-grandparents and twice removed aunts. Nearly everyone on that wall is dead now. When I walk by the framed sepia prints, I’ve trained myself to look at the floor as I pass. I can’t bear to look at my father, blond with a goofy smile plastered across his face, standing next to my mother in her wedding gown. It’s too strange to look at a photo taken to remind us of beginnings when one of the people in the photo ran out of them.
6. “Go to the forest,” he said. “Look for the resilience and the beginnings and the strange unabashed beauty. Climb the mountains,” he said. “You need to be reminded of your strength. Let your tears mingle with the muddy river water; meditate to the sound of your feet and the pulse of your heart.” The forest floor was blanketed in deep, parakeet-green moss, the kind that can only grow and flourish with the help of Marin County’s chiffon mist. My father would have loved the smell of the air, saturated with water and newly disturbed earth. I snapped a photo that he put above his drafting table and promised him that we’d go there together, meditate to the sound of our footsteps and take a picture together in front of the tallest tree.
7. Dad, I’ve collected pictures that remind me of the promises you made me; you kept them all except one. You promised you’d always be there, always keep me safe. You must have known that this wasn’t a promise anyone could have kept. Do you remember when I read you Song of Solomon? Probably not, that was towards the end, and you couldn’t stay awake for very long. I was so frightened that I’d turn into one of the characters. The one who died because the man she loved didn’t love her back. He left her. “Graveyard love” they called it “ ‘Thank God’ they whispered to themselves. ‘Thank God I ain’t never had one of those graveyard loves.’” I felt this love after you died, the kind that you are certain will kill you, knowing this type of pain could mean nothing else. That’s the thing about grief: it won’t ever do you that favor; it pushes and pushes until you’re out on the other side. So then, just like you used to do with me, I re-taught myself to breathe. Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, you would have said.
8. I don’t remember the way my father smelled, the way he walked, the way he said the words I heard every day. I only remember the way his eyes squinted when he smiled, how he breathed out a broad sigh when he sat down after work, and how his thick hands grew frail in the waning days.
9. What if I don’t remember enough? I am frightened that I’m losing bits and pieces of my father, that one day I’ll wake up and he won’t be my first thought. I’ve read about memory palaces, a way to keep your memories safe. The rememberer builds an imaginary house, and room by room, places a memory neatly inside before closing the door. I have not built a house; I am afraid that once it’s been constructed I won’t have enough to fill it and will be left empty. Maybe emptiness scares me more than the forgetting.
10. What’s the opposite of emptiness? Is it possible to be lonely when you are surrounded by people who love you? It is easier to be lonely in solitude. Solitude is a companion of loneliness. It is possible that one can feel the presence of ghosts, the presence of spirits, even if one always thought they didn’t believe in them. Maybe.
11. Maybe I’m not forgetting as much as I’m not remembering. There’s a difference between forgetting and not remembering, I keep telling myself. I remember the little things every once in a while, not the way he sounded or the times he was proud, or upset, or happy for me. Today I remembered a drawing he did right before he got sick. It was of two birds. He loved birds. In front of his car on the pavement that had been heating up all day in the summer sun, under the crimson glow of the stoplight, two barn swallows fought over a grasshopper. Are some memories worth more than others? Do memories of birds and sketches on notebook paper matter as much as the memories that have made me who I am?
12. Who am I? What am I made of? What is it that makes me who I am now, at this moment? Pens and paper and words and drawings?
a. Love, more love than I sometimes think I deserve
b. Loss, too much absence taking up room for other people
c. Foreign cities that smell of coffee and new water on old cobblestones
d. Speaking of coffee, coffee
These are the first things I think about. What I love or loved. Every word said in Mojave, pinned neatly to an emotion, begins with the prefix “heart;” the sayer, the feeler, the writer must push or pull or drag the word through their heart before it arrives at the hearer, the reader. The writing on my heart is about these things. The writing is always about these things.
13. Dad, I’ve been writing about you a lot lately, but everytime I do it feels empty. Your leaving gave me a lesson in loneliness. Not just you but Toni Morrison too. I was reading Beloved as you were dying in a hospital bed. Yes, it’s the book about ghosts, the one you liked. Before I knew what this loneliness would feel like, I knew there’d be two kinds. “There is a loneliness that can be rocked.” I can’t say much about this. But as for the other kind, the roaming kind, that loneliness sometimes consumes me. I was warned it couldn’t be held down, and it can’t. No new person, no new book, no new city will pin it into place. I think maybe that’s okay; you always loved to roam; maybe you knew this type of loneliness too.
14. I have learned to carry this type of loneliness with me, safely placed in the pockets of jeans and jackets. I always want to be in chiffon-mist forests, and on the banks of fast rivers, and on empty mountaintops, and lost in foreign cities at four a.m. I learned that when you’re alone, you don’t have to push loneliness away. It’s okay to be lonely when you’re alone, to let it envelope you like fog. The man I thought would always be there isn’t anymore. He’s been replaced by mountains and rivers and empty streets in the early morning.
Kateri Kramer lives and writes and climbs rocks in Denver where she grew up. She enjoys wandering through foreign cities, drinking exorbitant amounts of coffee, and making art.
