Ghosts

Photo by Nadine Marfurt on Unsplash

Of course I don’t believe in ghosts. I’m a rational doctor, aren’t I? The curtain rustles, an owl hoots, I feel a chill on my skin. Okay, I’ll admit it, I’m not so sure anymore.

Someone who meant a great deal to me died recently. He was my oldest friend’s dad and, because my parents were often posted abroad, I spent a lot of time in their house when I was growing up. My own family life, though loving, was strict. Ours was a careful home except when it was loud with argument, and the edges of things were hard. It was different at my friend’s place. I remember meals round the table with her family, noisy games and music, everyone telling jokes and getting untidy. And her dad was always there in the thick of it, pouring an extra glass of wine, laughing, forgiving mishaps. It was a place I could let go.

I was shocked then when my friend said her dad had been diagnosed with cancer and needed surgery. He’d been enjoying a robust old age and seemed to have many more years ahead. But then his operation turned out to be complicated and he didn’t recover quickly. And just when it looked like he was finally on his way home from hospital, he got ill again and was told he wouldn’t live much longer.

By this time, I was kicking myself that I hadn’t visited him. And soon, my friend was talking in days rather than weeks and I realised early one morning, drinking tea in bed and looking out on the peachy stillness of the garden, that I had missed my chance. It wouldn’t be right to encroach on the hours or days that remained of this elderly man’s life, however dear he was to me. Memories of my childhood returned to me with a joyful density then, things I hadn’t thought about in years: the night he’d caught a bunch of us smoking and had burst out laughing while trying to be angry, the letters he and his wife had written me at boarding school. I saw that the security I’d felt in my friend’s house wasn’t safety from harm so much as that rare expansiveness that allows a teenager to flourish. I imagined going to his hospital bedside and telling him how much he had meant to me, that he had been like a second father, a softer, gentler version of my own.

On one of the last nights of this man’s life, my husband and I took our older two kids out for dinner, a bus ride from where we live, as a treat before their return to university. As we settled down at a table near the door of the restaurant, it suddenly struck me how near we were to where my friend’s dad was dying. I could imagine the exact route I might take to his deathbed, along the road to the hospital, in through its revolving doors, up the lifts and onto the ward, the relief it would bring me to sit by his bedside and kiss his cheek and hold his hand and thank him for half bringing me up.

I had a menu in my hand which I hadn’t even glanced at it. So when one of my children nudged me, I half expected to find a waiter wanting my order. Instead, what I saw was a man entering the restaurant right in front of me who was the spitting image of my friend’s dad, but not as he was now, frail and dying. And not even as he had been in his hearty old age, but as he was back then, in my adolescence, with his high brow and humorous eyes, his cleft chin and dark hair swept roguishly to one side. He looked at me and held my gaze. And of course I get the prosaic explanation, that this stranger was simply responding in kind to someone shamelessly staring at him. But that’s not how it struck me then. In that moment, I felt that I was seeing a ghost of my friend’s dad at exactly the age I am now, with my young adult children flanking me as we used to him, and that this beneficent pre-death Shade had come to say goodbye.

I’ve always admired the first scene in Hamlet, the brazenness of starting a tragedy with a ghost - and such an earnest one at that – when we’re all so ready with our scorn. And I realise how silly I sound. But Hamlet’s words to his best friend- “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” - resonate with me now more than ever. Maybe this is partly what growing older is, the process of starting to see things in all their marvellous oddity. Perhaps we need only take one step closer to our own graves to begin to appreciate how fully love might be all around us.