Andrea Lambert
BEFORE HER GHOST rose to obsess me, she was my wife.
Katie Jacobson: twenty-three-year-old gold star lesbian from a well-off East Coast family. Educated at Occidental College and CalArts. Katie was a fellow CalArts Creative Writing MFA. Entered the program a few years after I graduated. I met Katie in 2008 through a mutual friend: Stephen van Dyck. Stephen hosted a series of parties we both attended. Katie was Stephen’s friend from their dorm at Occidental college. At his best man toast at our wedding, Stephen said he always knew this union was inevitable.
Katie entered my life when she moved to North Hollywood and entered the CalArts MFA program for her first year. 2009. My abusive relationship with a meth-addled transgender prostitute was falling apart. I was about to have two books published and go on disability.
Katie rescued me from a party where my soon-to-be ex-boyfriend was going to beat me. Drove me home in her car. A few days later when my boyfriend had moved out, I invited her over to visit meet my rat babies. We went to Necromance on Melrose. Our first date was macabre romance. At my birthday party I pounced. Katie stayed the night in my arms. We were inseparable since.
Four years. For four years Katie slept by my side in that wooden four poster left by my schizophrenic grandfather. We moved in together after the first six months. Left our respective North Hollywood hovels for a back house on a compound in hipster Silver Lake. Celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas in a honeymoon with friends for six months. It was there in Silver Lake Katie proposed, after sex one night.
When the compound fell apart we moved together to an Echo Park one bedroom with a mud room that we transformed into a dining room. We had many dinner parties and holidays there. Sent out elaborate joint photograph Christmas cards with the pets in costume. We built a life together in that hardwood-floored apartment overlooking Echo Park Lake. It was there that we won the Pink Cloud wedding contest and set about planning the wedding of our wildest dreams.
Our big beautiful gay wedding was May 14, 2011. Proposition 8 stopped its legality. Prop 8 was a stay on gay weddings from 2008 to 2013. It blocked the gay marriage legalization that had prompted Katie to propose in the first place. This required us to get a domestic partnership notarized for legality. We held the elaborate wedding ceremony we had planned anyway for the ritual and fun of things. Our wedding served no legal purpose.
We won a Pink Cloud wedding planning contest. Our wedding served a bunch of wedding vendors in getting their portfolios ready for the gay marriage landslide that was to come. Thus many vendors donated their services. The civil ceremony of our own writing was performed by my two aunts, the offici-aunts, in a Japanese Garden in Little Tokyo. We got married in downtown Los Angeles. Katie and I wore couture Louis Verdad. My best friend Omar gave me away. The invitations were letterpress. Gardenias lined black-table clothed tables with catered hors d’oeuvres. I carried a bouquet of white roses and eucalyptus. The wedding colors were white, gray, and pale green.
A year, two honeymoons and worsening alcoholism on my part later we were seeking marriage counseling. After one especially difficult fight that left me with a black eye and scratches on my wrist I awoke to find her prone, pants-less corpse next to me on the bed with vomit caked around its mouth. My wife took all of the prescription medication that I take for my mental illness and committed suicide. I was devastated. My wife killed herself to escape our marriage.
We cremated her. Had an elaborate funeral at Hollywood Forever. I remember the flowers moldering in that Echo Park apartment for months as I cried and drank.
I moved to Hollywood. Got sober through inpatient detox and outpatient rehab. I couldn’t get sober for my wife anymore but I could do it for myself. I lost my wife partially because of my drinking. For the very least I could stop now. I did stop drinking.
I took up witchcraft. Got a medical marijuana card on my therapist’s suggestion. I went to therapy a lot. Was still on disability.
The schizoaffective disorder that manifested through delusions, hearing voices, and seeing ectoplasmic shimmery shapes began to manifest as visitations from Katie’s ghost. At first Katie’s ghost was insistent, angry. She didn’t want to be dead. She didn’t want me to be dating a new man as I was eight months later. As I lay naked in my new boyfriend’s bed Katie’s ghost swirled around me. Her face appeared on the wall of his bedroom. Katie told me how sad she was to be apart from me.
At home I took down the wedding picture from the living room wall to appease my boyfriend. Katie’s face formed in the empty wall space. Melding in and out of a skull. Telling me how much she loved and missed me. I lay on my bed, hallucinating on the wall. After Katie’s visitation, I put the photograph back up.
My schizophrenia began to manifest solely as manifestations of my wife’s ghost. I came to believe that my schizoaffective disorder gave me an edge in communicating with the other world. I honed my tarot skills. I did spells. I studied witchcraft and yoga. I sat in yoga positions in my witch hat with my hands raised in occult gestures like antennae. Listening to the voice of Katie’s ghost. She told me many things.
I never see Katie as a white humanoid apparition as ghosts somehow manifest. I see her when I see her at all as a ball of energy or ectoplasm, moving across the ceiling. I have heard her voice many times. I always knew when the voice was Katie because she would call me “wuzh.” Our tender secret nickname for each other.
As a schizoaffective I often hear voices. First I try to figure out who I am speaking with. Sometimes I perceive the presence as telepathy from alien gods who I imagine are above me in a flying saucer in space. Aliens talking through my mind in a conference call to check in with me. Dionysus and Persephone tell me all is well and they are pleased with my progress. Happy I am such an open vessel for them to communicate with.
Sometimes the voices in my head just identify themselves as “Oh, we’re the voices in your head. You might want to put in your headphones because we’re about to get talkative.” Then I just put my headphones in, listen to Lana Del Rey, and tune them out. The voices I hear are encouraging, kind, helpful. They don’t scare me. They comfort me. I am lucky.
Auditory psychosis strikes most often with sleep deprivation. At least once a week I stay up all night. Don’t take my sleepy time schizophrenia medication. The Saphris usually puts me to sleep. Some nights when I have free time I prefer not to take the Saphris. Instead stay up all night. It is on those mornings after I have completed dawn meditation and yoga that I am most often visited by Katie’s ghost. I seek these visitations. I stay up all night often. I want to talk to Katie. I want to break through to the other side. Hear her whisper in my ear.
Katie’s ghost began to visit me in the first year after her death before I scattered her ashes. At the year anniversary of Katie’s death, upon her ghost’s urging, I scattered Katie’s ashes at Echo Park Lake with an AA buddy. I reserved a small ziplock for her parents. Gave it to them at a dinner when they visited. Opening the cardboard box of ashes that had sat for a year in my drawer in a Hollywood Forever shopping bag was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. Scattering the ashes of my dead wife into the blue and glittering water of the newly renovated lake we had so loved together and lived above for most of the relationship, I watched the ashes drift down into the green-blue water from the paddleboat. In the boat with me was: a wedding invitation, her funeral card, one of her zines.
Katie’s ghost was angry and aggressive with me for a while for dating someone new and neglecting to scatter her ashes for so long. She swirled around me on a hiking trail in Griffith Park with my boyfriend. The anger continued for two weeks. Then one night I heard Katie from my boyfriend’s bedroom bidding me farewell in a rising chorus of angel voices. She was rising up towards the next level in the afterlife. Bidding me farewell and love as she moved on. I thought I wouldn’t hear from her after that. I was wrong.
When Katie’s ghost came to me after that she was milder. She had accepted that I was dating someone new and felt that I adequately honored her. I started a short-lived small press with the intention of publishing her thesis manuscript via print-on-demand. I released Katie’s zine Vergangenheitsbewaltigung as our second in a chapbook series that was to include three chapbooks before I dissolved the press a year later, realizing my financial resources for such a project were simply not adequate. Small presses just eat up your money. As a disabled women I must husband my resources. Katie’s ghost seemed to understand this. She did not rage at me when I gave up the project.
Katie’s ghost visited me from the great beyond many times, especially after late nights. Told me of the afterlife. Her further adventures as a ghost. What would likely happen upon my death.
I now include an excerpt from my unpublished novel, Diary of a Hollywood Hedgewitch, in which I wrote about a real-life encounter with her ghost.
II.
I HEAR VERY clearly in my head, “So now you get to be noble and I get to be dead.” Katie’s ghost is back. Sleep deprivation often brings this on. I don’t take my schizophrenia medication and I hear voices. Of course reading that story exactly about our relationship that eerily predicted the suicide called her ghost up again, clearly.
I finish reading Katie’s manuscript. Make small copyedits. Look over and approve Harold’s edits. The heat is on. Bewitched plays from the TV. I am acutely sad for my dead wife who was so brilliant as to have predicted everything in this her novel from beyond the tomb. I saw myself and her again and again in reading it.
I forgive Katie for everything. She was troubled, as was I, and we were locked in a death dance where only one of us could survive. I didn’t kill her. She took her own life as assuredly as she predicted again and again with the suicides of the characters in her book. When I got her laptop back, there was a background of a woman shooting herself in the head. I finally changed it after I couldn’t look at it anymore.
A voice in my head chants, “Katie committed suicide because she could not be living with you in a relationship for a single second longer . . . she thought but now realizes maybe that was a bad idea.”
Katie chimes in, “Because now I’m stuck in purgatory and it’s shitty here, the food and table manners are so, like, institutional. It’s like afterlife rehab. Basically imagine Las Encinas with more gray dust and doric columns.”
“That doesn’t sound that bad,” I say inside my brain to her.
As I type at my desk, Katie’s voice in my head says, “Okay you are so on your game writing this all down as I say? We are automatic writing? Oh it’s on! Okay, so anyway, the afterlife? It’s um . . . challenging. Like, we’re all here in this place, and we have similar stories. It’s like we just talk about our lives all the time and work things out about them. It’s like an endless therapy session. Sometimes they bring in finger sandwiches or give you a mani-pedi. So, it doesn’t always suck. Basically I’m just going a little stir crazy only having a few people to haunt.
“I mean, how do I put this? It’s like, if you want to reunite with me in the afterlife you can, but you might have to stay in purgatory if you do. Whoosh, I want you to go to heaven with Bobby and be happy. His Catholic agnostic good guy thing and your Wicca good witch thing you will be VIP in heaven. It’s not Christian faith! It isn’t like the Christian faith says in the afterlife!
“It’s practically like an alien subculture, the aliens that fuck with humans. They’ve been coming to Earth for so long. Ancient Aliens is right. The aliens run the afterlife, too. The chick who does my nails on Thursdays is an alien and she always has the most fascinating stories about . . . What was I talking about? Okay aliens, there’s a lot of aliens in the afterlife. They seem to run everything. Just get used to it. Humans are an inferior species but still useful to study. ‘Your blind faith in the gods of your ancestors is beautiful to see, all of you,’ the alien above me just said. The aliens that still come here come in peace. It’s a hobby for them to watch people on Earth.
“It’s definitely a hobby for souls in purgatory to watch people on Earth. We are just waiting for you and Bobby to get married. Then I might be able to go to heaven to meet you guys there if I’m extra good. I mean, purgatory is a little bit like prison. It depends how long you stay on how well you play the game. I’m actually really good at this from my time at Kent Place. If I play my cards right I could be in heaven to meet you guys instead of being here in purgatory fucking about. It’s like endlessly fucking about on Wikipedia on a late long night here, seriously. Before you say that doesn’t sound that bad, like that could be heaven where you are and you don’t realize it, I mean, maybe I’m in heaven? It seems purgatory-ish still. Maybe it will get better and I’ll just kind of ease my way into a better situation here with the angels. The angels are a type of alien. The humanoid winged kind. They’re mostly concerned with managing the afterlife.
“You have a book on this, that book that we bought at Illiad Books, the old spell book, but it’s all . . . Oh I forgot. That one’s all in Olde English and from an 1890 perspective. No, don’t read that one.”
“Thank you so much for telling me all this stuff,” I beam off through my brain at one pm in the afternoon.
“Liveblogging on point today, bee-tee-dubs,” Katie says. “You always were good at writing down what the voices in your head told you.”
A car passes loudly outside. I hear my cat tapping a toy around. Thumps and bangs. Voices, cars, the typing keys, all of the ordinary human noises I had been avoiding to listen to Katie’s voice. Suddenly I’m hearing the old black lady on the corner talking. Pings of e-mail coming in.
“That’s nice, okay, I don’t care, I don’t care,” I say as I go through my e-mail. “That wasn’t directed at you, Katie. You can keep talking to me for as long as you want to.”
“You have a lot of shit to do, wuzh. Stop listening to me and get to work,” she says. I consider. Read back through what she told me. Tear up.
“Katie!” I sob.
“The porn virus, the porn virus, that porn virus,” Katie says in my head. “Okay, now that I’ve got your attention. I want you to tell Stephen that it’s going to be okay. Wait, I’ll tell him that. He’s getting better at hearing me now. It’s a special way of hearing. You’re really good at it. Shining, yes, that’s what it’s called sometimes. Because we’re each shining in each others’ minds and hearts for a moment.”
I feel Katie close to me. Her presence. I look over my shoulder. Only the broken lamp from Ikea with a Mexican wrestler mask on it. The orange blur of the couch we bought together at Goodwill that Bobby wanted to replace for me.
“Nooo, don’t replace the couch.” Katie says. “I like haunting this couch. You sit on this couch a lot. I can hold you.”
“Okay, sweetie, you can haunt the couch. Haunt it up.”
“Now that you smoke pot 24/7, aren’t you the sweetest person ever.”
“Pretty much, yes. That might have something to do with how loud and clear I hear you. I don’t know yet. It doesn’t make me inclined to not smoke weed.”
“Keep smoking weed. Keep smoking weed!” The rising whir of weed. Voices on the street. “I want to help you with some witchcraft.”
“Okay,” I think. I go to my altar. Cross my legs. Light incense and a candle. Lift my hands in the Horned God and Goddess gestures. Katie directs me to go to page 137 of Green Witchcraft where there is a Money spell. I turn one more page to the Health spell. I draw a circle, invoke the elements, and do a spell for the health, wholeness, and healing of Lish Pulverizer and Jessie Davis. In the final visualization I see the three of us sitting together in an outdoor café in Los Angeles. Jessie slim. Lish healthy. Three friends talking in a café that gradually spins up and out of sight. I close the circle. Snuff the candles. Sit back on the couch.
“We will have to take Lish,” says the voice. “The Grim Reaper keeps going out for her and then it’s only love that holds him back. Your love and that of her friends and family. Do you release her? The afterlife will be good to her and her suffering now is great. Are you ready take on the responsibility of your love being the only thing keeping her alive?”
“I release Lish to her destiny,” I say. I cry.
Katie’s voice comes back. “This is happened, this is happening Andrea. You need to know that Bobby is deeply in love with you but conflicted about not being able to have children with you and whether you’re ever going be over me and put all the witchcraft away. He loves you, and he will marry you regardless of any of his misgivings. Remember when I told you I had psychic powers because I had a mental disorder and you told me I was crazy and should just take my medication? Well. you should probably take your schizophrenia medication eventually unless you really want to hear me all the time. But I mean, I’ll hang out as long as you want to.”
I hear laughing. The walls seem to be vibrating. A high streak of hilarity from a driver going by.
“You should go to sleep, yeah! You should go to sleep, yeah! You should go to sleep, yeah!” Katie repeats it over and over until I say yes. I will. It is one pm. I take my medication and sleep.
III.
WHAT THIS VISITATION as well as the other visitations have taught me is that there is an afterlife. My wife is in a good place. She loves me. Like Lana Del Rey sings, she will be “waiting on the other side.” I know I will be reunited in death with my wife. I plan to live a long full life beside my boyfriend and then when I am old and gray lie down and meet up with Katie again in the great Echo Park Lake in the sky.
I am so relieved that my schizoaffective disorder is choosing to manifest as comforting visits from my wife’s ghost instead of something dangerous or scary. This reassures me that the genetic burden of mental illness can be a blessing and not a curse. I have heard from others of Katie’s friends that they have more trouble than I do communicating with her ghost. Katie’s ghost is always trying to communicate. My wife’s ghost is an active ghost. Haunting it up.
I hear souls after suicide are trapped in purgatory. I imagine it will be a long time yet that I continue to hear her. Perhaps until I join her. I am pleased by that. Resigned to be a haunted widow. Continually with one foot in the grave. Hearing voices from the afterlife. My haunting muse inspires me. I listen for her always.
~
Andrea Lambert is the author of Jet Set Desolate, Lorazepam & the Valley of Skin and the chapbook G(u)ilt. Her work has appeared in HTMLGIANT, 3:AM Magazine, Fanzine, Entropy, Queer Mental Health, and Enclave. Her poetry has been anthologized in Writing the Walls Down:a convergence of LGBTQ Voices, Off the Rocks #16, The L.A. Telephone Book, You’ve Probably Read This Before, and Chronometry. She is a visual artist and CalArts MFA. Find her online at andreaklambert.com.