Ghostbusters ...

Ghostbusters


I've been thinking it over, and lately I've come to wonder if there really are ghosts among us.

No, I don't mean those translucent blobs of smoky white that you sometimes see in the cinema.

Ghosts of a different nature. Ghosts that, some nights, simply send a crawling feeling up your back. Ghosts that, on other nights, seem to have the appearance of someone you once knew, someone almost corporeal who flicks by the corner of your eye in your peripheral vision.

Sometimes, I recognise these people, but other times, I couldn't, for the life of me, say who they were.

When I moved into my ivory white tower, 25 floors above the ground, I was unpacking and trying to arrange furniture around boxes of "stuff" on my first night here. Suddenly, I happened to see my late mother standing at the kitchen sink and washing unpacked dishes. In the next instant, she was gone. I was startled, because she had passed away some 40 years ago, and I had never had any kind of spectral experience with her ghost before. But there she was, doing exactly what I might have expected her to be doing had she still been alive and helping me unpack.

It was an eerie sensation, and I remember saying to myself, "Damn, the air must be pretty thin up here ..."

Then Larry showed up.

Larry is a resident ghost. I don't think he is partial to hanging out in my place much these days, but in the first year that I lived here, he was very much a going concern.

Larry is not a friendly ghost, but neither is he all that malicious. What Larry likes to do is break things. Since moving in here, I have had Larry breaking most of the glass and crystal that I brought from out west, the fragile memorabilia of my youth. First, he flipped a cherished vase that my mother owned right out of my hands and into a thousand pieces across the kitchen floor. Then it was a crystal fruit bowl that he edged off the counter and left in a pile of fractured pieces. Soon afterwards, a priceless wooden carving, a memory of my time in Paris, was casually tipped off the top of a bookshelf and into three pieces. Nothing was safe — cups, plates, candle holders, all these went asunder under Larry's determination to make my life as miserable as possible.

Then, Larry up and left without a word or crash or shivery shatter. The last I saw of him was when I was coming home one night, and he flicked by the doorway at the end of the hall. Yes, I was surprised to see him al all, but there he was, not quite a vapour, but not easily describable. Apparently, he had found a new victim for his haunting. I'll admit, I chuckled at the sensation. I almost missed him, but then I have never been much good with rejection of any kind, even the welcome kind.

Now, if we assume that some departed spirits are lingering in the corners of our lives, I find that possibility somewhat disconcerting and terribly tragic. The common notion is that these spirits have some unresolved business left behind after their departure from the living world. Unrequited love, unfulfilled promises, expectations gone awry, jealous disappointments, hopes and dreams cut short, incomplete plans and projects ... any number of these things might supposedly cause the dearly departed to decide to forego the "bright light" at the end of the hallway.

It's sad, really, terribly sad.

In a perfect world, every individual's journey among the living would run its course to completion, and death would simply be an exclamation mark on the great experiences of a full life. Of course such is not always the case.

Ah, well, there's the rub ...

Fail to live life to its fullest and you're bound to fail in death as well.

As I used to tell my kids, "In life, some win, some lose, but we all get to chose."

So it goes ...


© Kennedy James. All rights reserved.