40: I noticed my breath while at a gas station...

   

    I have been thinking a lot about ghosts recently. This thought train has been partly catalyzed by the Christmas season and the natural proclivity to aim musings towards the nostalgic and the ethereal; i’ve always assumed that most of us fall into a similar pattern. The darkness of the winter days also produces both a bleak and a mystifying backdrop for internal pondering. We have limited physical sight with only the hints and outlines of trees and terrain flitting at the edge of our eyesight, so we naturally turn both inwards and backwards with our sight (with a touch of cautious soothsaying directed at the nebulous future that may lay out there in the blackness). It would also be unkind towards Dickens if i didn’t admit that he has always had a small part to play in my annual introspection. His inspiration for a tale set “at a time when the veil between spirit and physical world is thin” revolved around the wisps of past, present and future that tend to nestle about the rafters of our houses during such a season as this.


    My breath exiting my lungs and hitting the cold winter air is the ghost of my reliance on the physical and chemical requirements, I noticed this more acutely this morning while filling up my gas tank. This charges my imagination into seeing ghosts luridly leering from street corners or timidly tip-toeing along empty hallways. The specter of the future that a homeless man veered from leans tired and cold against a street sign. A healthy glow of satisfied and contended presentness that wafts from the curled body of my Dog as he dreams of rabbits by the fire. The nagging wraith of regret from things i have done or, worse, haven’t done wrap a silky shawl around my shoulders. The spirit of budding tenacity radiates from the young boy pedaling an icy bicycle up a snowy hill in defiance of the difficulty, portending a possibility of a fierce and fearless man of self-possessed prowess. The low, dull moan of the bravado of youth being dragged behind a man who sees only drudgery and paperwork between his current commute and an ill-defined retirement into soul-less golf trips. The lost spirit of direction eking out of the teary eyes of the old tribal chiefs eyes as he sits mournfully on his hospital bed with self-inflicted but healing neck wounds. It all plays the imagination into a whimsical but weary contemplation of what we truly carry with us aside from the clothes and scars and bits of lint in our pockets.


    In a more literal sense, this line of thought brings me to my Dad. I have tried multiple times to write something meaningful and poignant about his recent death, but the saved document from 11 months ago hasn’t magically catharsed itself into prose yet and that leaves me with the unfortunate task of having to actually wrestle with the ghost of his absence. I don’t claim to have any special knowledge of the inner-workings of the afterlife; what is left behind, if anything is left behind and how much of that can or should be interacted with. It seems like a cheapening of Heaven for any part of my Dad to have to experience even an ounce of the pain and hollowness that is left in the wake of his departure. It seems even more cruel that he should have to have any conscious interaction with the pained family who he is apart from. It should never have to be that he sees even the flicker of sorrow on my face when, absentmindedly, I pick up the phone to call him regarding a water heater issue that I can’t puzzle through. I sincerely hope that his ghost is solely the echo of our collective memories and projections of him onto our current lives. His is a welcome haunt, but one that I pray that he never experiences.


    The lives we could have lived, the people we should have loved more, the grace we should have extended, the doors that we should have opened (or shut hard and bolted), the echos of laughter and crying and wailing and singing and muttering and screaming and cooing and swearing and lying and comforting and calling out for a loved one all wrap around us in an ethereal cloak as we traverse this mortal way. We can so easily be enslaved and entrapped by the lost longings or lifted up by the lofty legends of old that stir us to be something better than we are. Ultimately, we can be engulfed by the could be, should have been, want to be, would have gone. Praise be to God for allowing the Ghost called Holy that we can willingly be haunted by. The one we can allow to echo more loudly than the misgivings and the lost trust, the one we can give our could-haves to. The one who we can show the secret sins of our selfishness to with no fear of condemnation and every hope of reconciliation to and with the Author of the truth.


    Having seen the inexplicable smile of pure Joy on my Dads face as he “gave up the Ghost” while the sunshine poured onto his deathbed removes the pause that I have that this same Author is writing something profound and deepening, Holy and wholly unfathomable by our surface-scraping knowledge of the cosmos. Painful and poignant, peaceful and tempestuous, equal parts rending and unifying. He is penning something deeply disturbing to our land-locked line of thinking that revolves around plans for costco-runs and fears that our co-workers don’t like us, something that upends our minor-league concerns about the now opens up keyholes for us to peep through into something terrifyingly beautiful and completing. And just as confounding as all of this, he allows us to decide whether we would prefer to be haunted by the sins of our petty past and our unfulfilling future or the Ghost who was with and one with the Author when pen was first set to cosmic paper. Choosing the former leads to the swirling drift of compounded and morose “what-ifs” that we are all so familiar with. Choosing the latter is an invitation to step into the very essence of the only story that we ever needed.