My Favorite Haunting

      All the adults with heavy suitcases under their eyes and wine-stained teeth insist that it will pass. I am not convinced. I have sat for hours piecing together fractured pieces of crispy autumnal afternoons that took place in the suburbs of Detroit by your side. The duality of your face was unlike anything I've known before, and I suspect, unlike anything I'll ever know again. It was sharp and soft. In different lights and moments, it appeared simultaneously young and old. It was either red and plump from merriment and beverages or gray-ish blue from disease and the injustice that we labeled simply as the passing of time.

      I didn't wash that long black dress. I wrapped myself in it through the winter that came. It smelled like your homeland. I haven’t picked the earth off my red Converse because I like to take remnants of where you and your wife grew up with me wherever I go.

      The week of your birthday, I wore my dirty red shoes to a Cubs game with your son. We shared cracker jack while he lovingly made fun of the toothpaste dribbles and coffee stains on my sweater. We don't talk about you. He doesn't like to show his hurt to his daughters, and I puke if I try to tell him how much I loved you.

  I resent my pen. Its artful skill in depicting my heart's confusion has never been rivaled by any utterance of my tired lungs. The flaw of my pen is that it is almost always painfully  late. The rendezvous of pen and paper is an hour after your sister weeps in your arms, the week after your best friend's funeral, or at 3 am when you can't sleep because you can't stop wishing you had said something… anything— punctuality has never been a virtue of mine anyways. The best I could do in that moment at the game was to look at my father with an expression that said: "I know."

       Maybe my grief is selfish. Keeping you here, calling on you to pray for me, does it distract you from the wonders of Heaven? I know that's not how it works, but it has crossed my mind. When you haunt me, I recall the versions of myself I felt safe in. Those versions of me died with you in that little bed I didn't get to in time: Granddaughter, friend, mid-day coffee-sipper, and book-meme emailer.

    I knew who you were. I saw your Irish integrity. I peered right through your smokey tough facade to your profound benevolence. I saw your luminescent soul. I feel it so deep in my bones that when we meet again when I finally come Home, you'll be wearing your yellow world's best grandfather crew-neck you bought when my sister was born, and I'll be about 14 again— those were the best versions of ourselves anyways. But, for now, I've got to listen to Mama. I'm gonna try to let you pass. 

    I'm putting the notebooks and the pens up on the shelf. I am making a weepy attempt at a conclusion to my favorite haunting. I'll let the memories slip through my long fingers that, of course, look like yours— because tragedy always calls for ironic relief at the most intense moment of the story. They'll fall to the ground, and I'll bury them there until we meet again, and you don't have to haunt me anymore.