I Am Trying To Tell You Something About Ghosts

And an invocation for the living and the gone

I am trying to tell you something about ghosts, but they keep interrupting.

Not with rattling chains or drafts that flicker the candle, no. These ghosts come as flashes of my grandmother’s hands at the laundry—the grandmother who shaped me with her absence. They come, too, as my Nana’s love of the lake and its deep rocks, the sound of my own voice in grief, the way it sounds like someone else’s, someone long gone but still right here.

They come as my great-aunt Lala who loved me without condition, who had no children of her own and who died when I was ten, who visits in the form of Raggedy Ann dolls with loose button eyes sewn on imperfectly with new thread and a foot repaired with a baby sock, and the way I sometimes crave butterscotch candy I haven’t tasted in decades. Lala was widowed twice, but her love was whole and she poured it into me, not knowing whether I would remember.

But I did.

The dead do not vanish. They reorganize as the syntax of our loves and fears, the rhythm of our …