Ghosts

“That man is a ghost,” said the old woman.1

She was always doing this, back when I was a girl—this sort of linguistic trickery, setting up the object of interest and applying some unexpected shade to it. Like something you’d expect from an amateur writer, except she knew exactly what she was doing. She was a professional. A Queen.2

“What do you mean by that, mam-mam?” I would coo, all stars-in-eyes and admiration.3

“Well,” mam-mam would say. “He is old. That much is obvious from the wrinkled skin, the tree bark face, the fact that he still dresses like it’s the 1890s when it is clearly the 1920s. But to be a ghost one does not need merely age.4

“He is someone who has had a long, varied life, some would say a full life. But this last is not so. There has been nothing full about his life, nothing fulfilling, nothing completed. You can tell it by the lines in his face, the expression beaten into his brow. He has had children die, his wife grow weary and leave, his dreams and expectations peter out for no reason at all to become unfulfilled, unattainable. He has let this happen, but he will not admit so even to himself.5

“And when the specters of the past, the dead dreams and the dead faces and all the burst bubbles come back to him, as they do with more and more recurrence at this stage of his life, they take some part of his mortal frame with them each time they depart. Soon he will be all spirit. He is a ghost. I am a ghost.”6

I am at about the age now she was when she told me that. I did not understand then. But now, when I remember the two men I’ve outlived and the children I’ve seen buried, the campaign I thought would change the world that went down in flames—the philosophical answers I’d hoped for burn up in a fire of their own reason—now that I see all this, I know exactly what she means. I, too, am a ghost.