I’m very aware that my problems are not unique. There are millions (billions?) of people worse off than me. People dealing with food insecurity and housing insecurity and misogyny and racism and homophobia. I have a roof over my head and clothes to keep me warm. If I get hungry, all I have to do is open my refrigerator and rummage through the leftovers. In the grand scheme of things, my tiny, insignificant complaints are trivial.
And yet they feel crushing to me. Keep me up at night. Fill my days with spasms of tears. Overwhelm even the simplest of tasks. This afternoon, I stood by my kitchen sink, washing dishes, and found myself crying over the loss of poet Wendell Berry.
I know the world is arbitrary. An earthquake isn’t vengeful, and a forest fire is just a forest fire. It’s really easy to anthropomorphize things like natural disasters and famines and epidemics, to think of them as evil. They aren’t. They’re just what they are. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Even death isn’t necessarily good or bad. Death is just death.
Marie Howe tries to have a conversation with a ghost . . .
The Promise
by: Marie Howe
In the dream I had when he came back not sick
but whole, and wearing his winter coat,
he looked at me as though he couldn’t speak, as if
there were a law against it, a membrane he couldn’t break.
His silence was what he could not
not do, like our breathing in this world, like our living,
as we do, in time.
And I told him: I’m reading all this Buddhist stuff,
and listen, we don’t die when we die. Death is an event,
a threshold we pass through. We go on and on
and into light forever.
And he looked down, and then back up at me. It was the look we’d pass
across the table when Dad was drunk again and dangerous,
the level look that wants to tell you something,
in a crowded room, something important, and can’t.
Depression is a haunted state, I think. I’m surrounded by ghosts right now. As I deal with my work troubles, as I wait for the excavator who dug up my sewer to send me his bill, the ghosts of simpler, easier times crowd my brain. I mourn for my daughter’s five-yer-old self, how I would read Charlotte’s Web to her at bedtime and she would laugh at Templeton voice. I mourn for the Sunday dinners my sister Sally used to cook before she got sick, how we would gather at my parents’ house to eat and laugh. I mourn for my mother’s singing when I play the pipe organ at church, how she anchored the hymns with her soprano voice.
It all boils down to grieving for things that are gone forever.
I am coping with my blue mood as best I can. I still cry almost every night as I’m going to sleep. And I still experience extreme panic while driving to the library or the university during the week. Tonight, I watched a documentary about the life of Mary Oliver, and I wept at the end of it. Last night, my wife, son, and I had to stay at a hotel because the water line into our house was either crimped of broken, and, after everyone was asleep, I just lay in bed beside my wife, missing the taste of water from a garden hose as a kid. Ghosts, ghosts, and ghosts.
I’m sure my therapist would tell me I’m just experiencing obsessive thoughts. An unhealthy nostalgia for bygone times. I don’t dispute that. I miss not having to worry about things like collapsed sewer lines and high water bills and consumer loans. Nostalgia is a ouija board, conjuring the ghosts of childhoods past. Was my childhood perfect? Absolutely not. Nobody can truthfully claim to have had an idyllic youth. Because we’re human, and human beings are fuckups. We fuck up relationships and jobs and cars and climate and trees and honeybees and . . . Well, you get the idea.
I’m a fuckup on many levels, every day. I’m not afraid to admit that. Recently, my perceived fuckups have been overwhelming, making me question almost everything about my life. In the last few weeks, I’ve even questioned if I’ve made a lick of difference in the universe. On bad nights, the ghosts in my head whisper “No, you haven’t.” On better nights, the ghosts whisper, “Maybe a little.” (Ghosts can be pretty annoying sometimes.)
Here’s a poem for his ghosts that Saint Marty wrote a few days ago . . .
Lovely Ghosts of All My Dead
by: Martin Achatz
I feel you around me all the time, your wispy
breaths in my ears, cool fingers on my forehead
at night. Sometimes, I can hear you as I drive
my car, telling me you like this Action Bronson
song or that new novel from Ann Patchett.
Let’s get McDonald’s this afternoon. My treat.
We can sit all together in a booth and talk about
the Perseids in the heavens, solar eclipse in Spain,
coming El Niño winter. We’ll stay there until
the oil in the French fryers turns bone cold.
