MetaChat - Ghosts.

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14 November 2006

Ghosts. →[More:] Every family has them. Mine, to some degree is that of a man I was too young to recall meeting.

On my Mom's side of the family everybody is incredibly long-lived, my nonno and nonna are in their 90's and still going relatively strong (knocks wood). When I was 6, I even got to meet my great-grandmother.

My Dad's side of the family is another story. My father was the second son of a New York Irish family. Lanky and lean-faced, he took after his mother. His older brother, my Uncle Mike, was broad and beefy, like his Dad who somewhat resembled Jackie Gleason. Mike was something of a golden boy, a high acheiver in school, who went on to Fordham and Columbia, graduating salutatorian, I'm told. My Dad was more of a knockarounder and underacheiver, but a survivor. Getting drafted after high school, and working his way slowly up from entry-level jobs. Mike married a woman named Kathy, who was my Mother's college roommate and a fellow New Yorker, like Mike and my Dad. Through this association my parents met and married.

Anyway, I don't remember Uncle Mike, even though he's my godfather, because when I was around three, he went swimming after having had a few drinks and, even though he was a competitive swimmer he drowned. His name was mentioned a lot when I was a kid, and I felt his presence in ways I wouldn't understand until much later. When I was found to be 'smart,' lots of pressure was put on me, I think because they thought I would be a high acheiver like him. When certain roadblocks came up in this department, disappointment in me was that much more palpable.

Oddly, nobody in the family was that fond of Aunt Kathy. They had a son, my cousin Darren (the only other male in the family with my last name) who I haven't seen in 20 years. She remarried and divorced, last I heard.

At my Dad's 60th birthday last year, he remarked that he was the longest lived man in family history (his parents, both drinkers, were dead by 59, and one grandfather died of yellow fever working as a sailor in Panama at 23 according to family legend). My Dad's younger twin sisters Annie & Patrice married two best friends from Brooklyn, my Uncle Nick (who, in an odd coincidence is also a twin) and my Uncle Vinny, who passed on Christmas Day last year, adding another ghost.

It's odd the way the presence of somebody you never knew can have an effect on your life.

post by: jonmc at: 09:59 | 3 comments

I agree. My mother lost both her parents when she was young, and I think her life kind of stopped then.

posted by halonine 14 November | 10:23

My favorite family ghost story (I may have told this before, but it's a good one): According to my birth mother, when I was born, my grandmother was very weak with cancer, and my mother was afraid to let her hold me; she was afraid my grandmother would drop me. Sadly, my grandmother died not long after, never having had the chance to hold me. But one day, apparently, I was asleep in my bassinet in my mother's bedroom, and the bedroom door slammed shut on its own and wouldn't open. My mother could hear me crying inside and tried with all her strength to open the door, but couldn't. Finally, the crying stopped, and she was soon able to open the door, as if nothing happened. My mother found me out of my bassinet and on the bed, the room cold and the rocking chair rocking, as if someone had just gotten up. "She just wanted to hold you," my mother said.

This, of course, is a literal ghost story, which my birth mother was fond of (I don't believe in "real" ghosts myself, though I'm fond of the stories, and I feel so sad for my grandmother, wanting to hold me). I know what you mean, though, about expectation-type ghosts. On the negative side, my father always seemed to be watching for signs of my birth mother in me; she was bipolar and had been in and out of mental hospitals most of her adult life. Whenever I'd "act up," i.e., get emotional, my father's eyes would go wide with alarm and sometimes he'd even say, "Just like your mother." I, myself, wondered for years. But now I just think I'm garden variety crazy (most days, anyway). Some days I wish I could see ghosts.

posted by Pips 14 November | 11:34

These are good stories, guys. I got nuthin'. I have a real ghost story, and I believe there are ghosts of our past marriages that can haunt our current one, as well as a kind of ghost that Pips talks about. My husband's first wife turned out to be a liar and a thief. (She stole her best friend's identification and ran up debts in the amount of $65,000.00 and she abandoned her kids). When we got custody of my step daughter three years ago, we were constantly being told by her great-aunt to watch her, that she was a liar just like her mother. Other than being a normal teenager, she shows no signs of her mother's ghost.

posted by redvixen 14 November | 20:01

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