by Terese Svoboda
What says grief to you? Probably not a sunlit meadow. What about the scent of too many lilies, a blank stone, netting over the eyes, an all-black outfit? So chic, all that black – but nothing says dead better than pavement. The premier Parisian color, it practically insists Dig Here. On the other hand, sympathy cards declare the overwhelming woodenness of my feelings, folded, with only the lick on the envelope possibly authentic. The thank you cards in response even come pre-printed. Few eulogies are delivered with the stamp of cynicism or irony that might authenticate individual mourning, as distinguished from the above puddle of saccharine responses. To soften the blows of grief, survivors pull linguistic veils over their brains, even unto the word itself, death. “Passing” replaces it, as if life were something given up bowels-first, completely ignoring the visceral start “death” gives the griever, feeling the dead suddenly present, which is instinctual grief, really just a variation on mouse- or snake-fear. What can you say back to grief?
You mount the pulpit and look over the heads of the grieving and see a bobbing white form afloat in the ether. Your job as eulogist is to conjure this ghost back to life by retelling the tangle of mishaps and crazy love and signature tics that made up the dead him or her or they. You’re very sad that you can’t go on forever cherishing this singularity because like sea foam, the details quickly disappear. To capture it temporarily, you create a story about the deceased in which good things happen, which will put him in whatever bed by means of your largesse, forgiveness, and perhaps exaggeration. You’re probably mourning yourself at the same time anyway – this could happen to me! That bit of self-administered horror provides a little thrill, mid-sadness, and makes the life of the dead you mourn more poignant. Haunting even.
When my mother died, the officiator said no speeches were allowed either at the funeral or the viewing. He wanted total control, no messy emotions. No one should get carried away except the dead. The only occasion left for us to say anything was over cookies and milk in the church basement, not conducive to the kind of toasts that might make her sound as difficult as she was. What my dad wanted at his funeral was any rendition of “I’m a Coca Cola Cowboy” played loud and long on the organ. Although his service was held in a Catholic church, we compromised with “Onward Christian Soldiers,” the tune he liked to sing while marching with his drip pole. Just telling you that cheers me up, signals my grief all over again.
What happens when there’s no grieving, when the survivors don’t mourn the dead enough or badly? Cultures have wrestled with that possibility and ghosts are what they’ve come up with. Such beings are supposed to hang out with the living indefinitely, in retribution, poised to terrify the unwary, forever seeking proper closure. In the midwest we have mall ghosts, football ghosts, sunflower ghosts, each with its own purvey. In my novel Dog on Fire, in the midst of the one the region’s famous dust storms –it’s not like they totally stopped after the 1930s – with the light glittery on the settling dust motes amid the shifting dissipating clouds, with land flat as far as you can see – not very far, in this case – of course you’d spot the undead coming out the swirling dust. No big deal. Every day you have to accept so much more: the behavior of electricity, the wizardry of zoom, the speed of light, and especially the truly unbelievable: augmented reality and artificial intelligence.
It’s not always a lack of grieving that causes a haunting. Grief’s hold can be so strong that the griever experiences difficulty breathing, and actually faints. Slowly, ever so slowly, this type of haunting changes. It doesn’t whisper I’m still here, over and over, but becomes a way of life and never goes away. Sure, you turn your back on the beloved dead by going about your life, what they’re deprived of, but one day you wake up relieved: grief this strong has at last penetrated your cells. You no longer fear forgetting any of the details, grief is part of you – and the ghost lives on.
My work has often been termed fabulist. The fabulist touches the fantastical, the haunted door frame, for example, in my book, and uses it to explore personal, human themes at the liminal edge of belief. One could argue that all fiction is fabulist if it’s done well, because so much of constructing a world out of memory is always going to be fantastic. Fabulist fiction, however, tends to privilege internal and interpersonal conflict over large-scale, action-heavy plots. The elements of fabulist fiction follow a kind of magical thinking. When something strange occurs, the story is less interested in why it’s happening—its origin or mechanism—than in what it means, creating its own emotional logic. You go with it.
Surrounded by the cherry trees that the Czechs love, my family’s Nebraska homestead is a big three-story 1930s farmhouse with a wide veranda. Now remodeled, the house used to have a secret passage that connected two bedrooms, a windy staircase, and a washhouse twenty feet away. A capacious single story aluminum shed, it held only a washer and wringer. No dryer, of course, not with the state’s never-ending wind. This was where my father and his brother went for a quick hosing after a day delivering wheat to the grain elevator, washing the chaff off themselves and horsing around, it was where my grandmother ran the noodle dough through the wringer after she hung up the clothes to dry.
My sister lived in the homestead all of one long winter. She had a new baby and a job delivering the mail to whatever boxes presented themselves over a twenty-mile range of wheat fields. She thought mail delivery would be ideal: she could take the baby along and get paid to stop the car once in a while. The cost of the gas soon forced her to reconsider, not to mention the snow that drifted high onto the empty roads. In the interim, trying to take a nap after one of her long runs, she awoke to a scritch-scratch somewhere.
This part of the world is where the Czechs married the Irish, and we were the first of that generation to have to deal with their love of hauntings. The Czech Republic touts the title of the “most haunted country in the world,” and the Irish seem to have more ghosts wandering around than the living. It was midafternoon for my sister, but the light was dim, a winter darkness soon to fall. Thinking the sound came from mice gnawing in the secret passage, she tiptoed past the sleeping baby, but not without first a quick look out the bedroom window.
A young girl had just come to a halt outside, her long skirt swaying. She had the look of the pursued, clutching at her laundry basket, with a bonnet caught in a knot around her neck. She was barefoot. After a frantic glance behind her, she scanned the house. Her eyes stopped at the window.
My sister was seen.
In rushing across the clearing, the girl tripped over the wheat stubble and fell. While she scrabbled around for fallen socks and loose pieces of linen, blood seeped from her cheek. The stubble underfoot must have been sharp. She rose to her feet, heaved the basket to her hip, her face scratched and panicked, and lunged at the window, crying Emily! Emily! as if my sister’s face were familiar.
The window was covered with plastic in those days of energy conservation.
My sister stepped back. She was not Emily, she knew no Emilys. At that point she wanted to, she wanted to call Emily herself, fetch her to save this poor girl from whatever she was so afraid of. But the baby cried just then, and my sister, like any new mother, turned to check on him. The girl was gone by the time she glanced back, but she did not run outside into the cold with the crying baby in her arms to search for her. It was only in her retelling the story to me that she realized that there was no wash house in the vision she had seen, just wheat stubble and a water pump.
Emily. So 19th century or anyway early 20th, she remembered thinking. Probably from the fifties, she told me, when kids wore those long dresses for playing pretend and kicked off Keds or Buster Browns and ran around barefoot.
In winter? Over wheat stubble?
She looked straight at me and said something was definitely chewing on the plastic over the window in the passage, and that she carried the baby downstairs to the cellar to set traps.