I’ll begin by telling you some ghost stories from deep in that
dark fold of time. We buried my sister’s ashes on our property, close to the
roots of a newly planted Elm. It seemed the right way to honor someone who had
spent so many years drawing pictures of people turning into trees. My mother
didn’t want to handle the ashes at the memorial any more than she had wanted to
hold the box when we first retrieved it from the crematorium. I couldn’t blame
her – I don’t think I could ever bear to see the body of one of my own children
reduced to ash in a tiny box. But ashes would have burned the roots of our
young elm. Someone had to blend them with an acidifying fertilizer, so I took
the ashes into the forest to do this thoughtfully. I wondered if I might feel
something, but as I mixed the ashes I knew Katrina was not in them. My sister,
who had always been pure spirit and yearned for freedom, was finally free of
the struggles of an embodied existence. Her presence felt like it was in the
trees and the wind and everything living around us, but not in the dust I was
holding.
After Katrina’s memorial, we placed a large stone over the place
her ashes were buried and engraved it with a line of her poetry: “Where you
find love, you will find me.” This was from a poem in her teenage years where
she is thinking about our transitory time on earth and wondering how it could
all end in nothing. She winds up concluding that love is what lasts and is most
permanent. And it’s true; with the specifics of my memory fading, I am left mostly
with an impression of the way she made me and other people around her feel. On one
particularly dark afternoon, in the depth of my grief, I was lying on my bed in
the afternoon with the blackout curtains drawn and the thought flashed through
my mind, “I don’t want to be here anymore.” I wanted to follow her down that
dark passage and not return to all the stresses and heartbreak of living. Suddenly
a light flickered on. It was one of the little LED battery-powered candles that
hangs from a sconce on my bedroom wall. Baffled, I got up and turned it over – still
lit, it was in the “off” position. I turned it on and off again and the light
went out. Never before, and never since, did I see that light come on
accidentally. But that day, for the first time, I realized Katrina was still
with us. Maybe our love and grief tethered her to the earth; maybe she knew we
still needed her. Love for her family had kept her alive long after she stopped
wanting to live, so maybe it also kept her spirit with us. She had always been a
strong and stubborn girl.
A couple years later, my parents noticed an Elm growing by their
pond in New York, with no other Elms nearby. Based on its size, it looked to
have taken root around the time we planted Katrina’s Elm at our home in Maine. From
the windows of their home my parents could look out on the pond and see the new
Elm growing larger each year. Other than the fact that there were no other Elms,
it was perhaps not surprising to see an Elm growing by a pond since Elms love
water. A fitting tree for my sister, a Cancer, who was a water spirit by every
measure.
I continued grieving for my sister, visiting and planting flowers by her Elm and stone, and keeping her memory alive. Holidays were always the hardest, because those used to be the rare times we had always counted on seeing her in person. Her absence at Christmas was palpable, especially in my parents’ home. She had always decorated the tree with my parents before we arrived, making constant naughty jokes about the ball ornaments. With all those memories, my parents didn’t even want to put up a tree without her. Then Covid hit, and as our family quarantined and then tested ourselves so we could gather in person for Thanksgiving 2020, we decided for practical purposes that year to combine all the holidays together. We celebrated Thanksgiving the first day, Zora’s birthday the second, and Christmas the third. Although it wasn’t really Christmas on that third day, we declared it so, finding a tree and decorating it so it could stand through the holidays and bring my parents some cheer. Zach spent much of that day chopping and stacking wood for my parents so we could have a real fire. At the end of the day, he handed me a piece of paper he had found on the lawn. It was a hand-drawn note from my sister, no bigger than two inches wide, with a pencil drawing of a candle and a message that read “If you’re going to have a Christmas, you might as well have a ‘Merry’ Christmas..” I presented it to my family at the table over dinner, and my mother and I were in tears. The note looked pristine, with no water stains or signs of wear. How could it just have appeared on the lawn? We guessed it might have blown out from the woodshed, since no new wood had been placed there in some time. My mother recalled Katrina having written such a message about ten years ago. But the oddly specific message - coupled with its appearance on a day that we were celebrating as Christmas (but wasn’t) - amazed even the nonbelievers among us. Katrina had a high bar to clear, with a family full of skeptical researchers and engineers.
I no longer had any doubt that Katrina was with us and that
she would be for at least as long as we still remembered, loved, and needed
her. I started visiting her stone more often. On All Hallow’s Eve, I poured out
a shot of rum into the earth over her ashes and lit a candle, saying that I
hoped she would stay with us for as long as she could. Later that month, Zora
needed some black pants for a choral performance and we couldn’t find anything
in her size. I was rummaging around in the attic, looking for something else,
when I came across an entire box of Katrina’s clothing that we had cleaned out
of her apartment and which I had forgotten existed. Most of this trove fit Zora perfectly,
including a perfect pair of black pants. I thanked my sister. She was still watching
over us.
There is a great deal more that has happened in the past
seven years; family vacations and all the beautiful messy life in between them.
But this was the weightiest part, the part that needed to be written down first.
Now that you know our ghost stories they may haunt you too, but I hope it will
be with the reassurance that loved ones only truly leave us when we are ready
to let them go. I’ve made peace with grief as a way to keep someone close for as
long as we need them. Maybe for always, until our own candles wink out.
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