If you respect the dead
and recall where they died
by this time tomorrow
there will be nowhere to walk.
Katie Ford, “Earth”
When Charlie is still a newborn, each morning as we walk through the swinging doors of our bedroom into the sanctuary’s main space, her gaze moves immediately to the corner nearest the now unused wood-burning stove. She smiles and coos as if she’s recognizing something, or someone.
“What do you see?” I ask her. The same corner, every morning. How can this be an accident or a coincidence?
“Grrr goo goo,” she gurgles, and then shrieks happily.
I ask Kent, “Do you really think the church is haunted?”
Kent’s mother, Ginny, claimed to see the ghost, a fact she dropped as casually as one might the time or a compliment at a dinner party; when Kent pressed her for more details she would only tell him that the ghost was a friendly girl, probably a teenager, whom she’d seen several times during the morning.
“I think the baby sees a ghost,” I tell Kent. “Maybe the ghost?” Charlie lunges at her father’s face.
“Maybe,” he says. “Maybe this ghost is excited to have another person around.”
“Or central heat,” I offer. “In which case we might see a lot more of her or him or it or however you refer to a ghostly person or form.” The night we returned to the church after the great booger incident, the man we’d hired to build a heater took us down to the basement, showed us a network of mismatched metal tubes and what appeared to be tinfoil connectors, all of which appeared to fit with some extraordinary shape logic of his own design. He flipped the switch and held his breath. A whooshing sound like a ship’s rudders beginning to turn filled the pipes, which shook as if breath had been pushed into them. It felt like being in the belly of a ship: the Super DIY Moby Dick Heating System. “I can’t believe it works!” he said, practically delirious with surprise and obvious relief.
Charlie and I begin greeting the possibly real, possibly imagined ghost each morning. “Hello, ghost!” I say, and then sometimes “Holy Ghost!” just to fit with the “this used to be a functioning church” theme. Charlie looks to the corner and flashes a toothless grin. I am deliriously happy on these mornings in a way that is as close to contentment as I’ve ever been. I know it’s the new-mother bliss feeling: everything the kid does seems like magic. This line from a Jack Gilbert poem, “A Brief for the Defense,” keeps tunneling into my thoughts: “We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.”
The ruthless furnace of those crucible years; a fire at the back, always. When Ronan was still living I sat at the boarding gate at the Denver airport and watched a dark-haired girl who was the same age as my son—who didn’t and couldn’t and would never move—bring a water bottle up to her lips and drink, over and over again. No trouble with the hands; the arms moved effortlessly. She had no trouble swallowing. No trouble holding up her head. No trouble at all, it seemed. I couldn’t stop staring at her—her easy ability to accomplish these everyday movements appeared miraculous to me; for any child dying of Tay-Sachs, or any parent watching their child die, it was just that. Now, here is Charlie doing all of the things in the correct order, at the right times, and in the right ways, and I hope I can remember these mornings and the feeling that accompanies them: the joy, magnified by an experience of the opposite.
A few months after Kent bought the church, in 1996, he said he grew worried about ghosts and “old energy.”
“What do you mean? You sound like someone who’s lived in Santa Fe too long and senses spirits in every corner and tells everyone about their power animal. Energy how?”
“I found some weird shit in the basement,” he continued. “I think it might have been sex stuff,” he said, but then wouldn’t elaborate. “My power animal is a badger, by the way.”
“Of course it is! Mine’s a gorilla.”
“Well, there you go. We fit right in.”
This was New Mexico, where a self-described shaman might claim the ability to communicate with your ailing pet or clear your aura while also identifying your angel guides, all in one session and for a set (high!) fee. Not a surprise, then, that it was easy enough to hire an exorcist “to clear the place of whatever,” Kent explained. For a hundred bucks (in cash, of course) a man who looked like Jackie Gleason moved through the sanctuary shouting, “C’mon, demon. Get out! Get on out, demon! You’d better MOVE. ON. OUT.”
“Did it work?” I asked.
Kent shrugged. “I felt better. So yeah, I guess.”
Despite my skepticism about spirit communication, I wonder if it’s not just the ghost of the young girl Charlie sees, or some other turn-of-the-twentieth-century-era ghost, but Ronan’s ghost. It doesn’t seem like the strangest idea. After all, we held his memorial here on the first day of March, a cold but sunny day, with a choir in the loft singing songs composed for him and using the one sound he ever made—GEE; my oldest friend sang “Yellow” by Coldplay on his acoustic guitar; people offered tributes and ate cheesecake and prunes, Ronan’s favorite foods. People brought their kids; one of my friends arrived pregnant, with a son she would later name after Ronan. My best friend, Emily, flew over from England yet again, the third time she’d visited New Mexico in as many years. People arrived from Los Angeles, Austin, Wyoming, and Boston. So if Ronan were to be summoned anywhere, wouldn’t it be in the sanctuary, this place where both children are present, either in the flesh or in the imagination? Prior to his death, Ronan spent many hours at the church: lying on Kent’s chest while we watched football; sleeping in the travel crib next to the bed. He spent his last Thanksgiving at the sanctuary’s main table, when at some point I looked at my dad holding Ronan and thought how small they both looked, Ronan’s body so thin and angular, and my father’s body diminished, too, by a sadness that he usually hid from me and that after Ronan’s death never truly left him.
We are always living on the top of old lives, living with ghosts, real or imagined, no matter which spaces we inhabit or what kinds of lives we’re living within them. This is true even if we don’t believe in the afterlife (it is also scientifically and empirically true, as this is the essence of dark matter). We are always walking where others have already walked, lived, been born and died.
How can we envision or conceptualize all the old stories we live with, in, through, and alongside? In Jerusalem’s Old City, it is possible to walk along the sidewalk, look down, and see the ruins and remnants of an even older Roman city, which once teemed with people and industry, drama and passion, spirit and life. All of it is gone now, literally crumbled to dust from which a few bent and precarious-looking pillars rise. Every day people walk along the city sidewalk above the older city, holding cups of coffee and bottles of water, talking on the phone, heading to work, to temple, to the mosque, to church. In New Orleans, they bury their dead above the ground. The living and the dead interact on a daily basis. When I lived in rural Texas, every evening I watched the sun set over the tiny graveyard visible through my office window. These stories connect and intertwine without our thinking about it. When my brother and I were kids riding in the back of our beat-up station wagon, each time my dad passed a cemetery we’d shout, “Hold your breath!” as if the dead buried there might notice us, make space for us before we were willing to have space made. Now when I pass a cemetery, I breathe deeply, wondering what mysteries and stories are hidden there, underground, understanding that the world would not be the world as it is without what the dead had done or left unfinished—mistakes and triumphs I will never know or have any way of knowing. I find this comforting. These stories, known and unknown, bear witness to the interconnection of the living and the dead.
At first glance, the abandonment of Jerusalem’s ghost world below the living world might appear to symbolize progress, or to show how remarkable the modern world has become, having “risen above” its previous primitive ways and habits and abandoning them for a superior way of life, a “better” place in the same way heaven is often described. But the concept of resilience has not always been so deeply connected to that of the triumph of communities or individuals; it has not always been associated with “casting off” the remnants of one life for a new and better one. In the Bible, the word “glory” is often used in reference to everyday, natural objects, things that are rendered fantastic by virtue of the wonder of their mere existence, by their usefulness: the brightness of heavenly bodies, the fruitfulness of a forest, the power of a horse’s snort, the intricacy of design in a well-made piece of clothing. Glory in the everyday items of everyday living.
That abandoned city, that child who no longer lives, that person who helped build your life and give it meaning who has now left your life and possibly the world: they are holding up everything you do now, in this moment, alongside all that ever was or will be. They move beneath your feet, their hearts beating across time and memory. Whether you know it or not, sense it or not, choose to acknowledge it or prefer to ignore it, you are caught up in and supported by all the lives that came before yours.