57 Ghost-ed.
I tell my children when my mother laughs or passes gas.
I tell them when she wants to listen to Leonard Cohen.
But I do not tell them everything their dead grandmother does or says. I do not, for example, offer them the moment in the car outside the neurosurgeon’s office where a woman who resembles their mother is weeping, whimpering, her forehead pressed into the steering wheel, her fist in her mouth, her mouth open in a silent scream—I do not tell them what makes me stop is the knowledge of her presence, her lips pursed looking for words the way she looks for words when she is worrying, when she is worrying, still worrying about me.[1]
Brandon Shimoda writes about the presence of absence, hauntology, unthoughts, ghosts:
Do you believe in ghosts? The answer, whether Yes or No or I do not know, is Yes, because I believe in the human desire to be afraid while simultaneously overcharged with disbelief. Fear manifests the ghost and its opposite: the ghost of the ghost, coming closer. How often is it asked, for example, if a ghost believes in the living?[2]
Shimoda asks how he will remember his grandmother’s face.
You won’t.
You won’t remember anything.
She is everywhere now. You are nowhere. You are nothing.
There is the notebook—
Still from a home video. Author swimming with her mother in the Atlantic Ocean.
- "There was a time when anyone could read the words senza parole—“speechlessness”—on my wrist. It was the expression that I got tattooed on my skin when I lost my mother: I can’t say a word, I don’t want to speak. It was my first tattoo, an indelible warning whenever someone held out his hand to help me. I pushed away from everyone after my mother died, especially from myself. I even dyed my hair black so as not to see in the mirror a reflection which resembled the mother I no longer had." Andrea Marcolongo, “Ancient Family Lexicon, or Words and Loneliness,” Liberties 1, no. 1 (Fall 2020): 221–36. ↵
- Brandon Shimoda, The Grave on the Wall (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2017). ↵