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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Seeing the Dead

Patricia Pearson on embracing—and being embraced by—ghosts
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Why do we see or feel dead friends or family, Patricia Pearson asks, and why is it thought to be a problem if we do?

In the late spring of 2015, my brother-in-law paid a visit to my sister’s grave, in a lush meadow cemetery amid the Gatineau Hills of southern Quebec. My sister had been dead, at this point, for seven years, and the couple had been separated for twelve. Doug sat in the grass among planted geraniums for half an hour or so, musing about the rise and fall of their marriage. He told Katharine, or her grave, that he was sorry for the part he had played in the dissolution. Then, plucking up and tossing a handful of grass, desultory, he began his two-and-a-half-hour motorcycle journey back to Montreal.

‘The landscape is open there, with a big wide sky, but it was overcast and had started to rain—just barely, but it made me a bit nervous,’ Doug later told me. Even fit riders in their fifties experience the occasional lapse in confidence. ‘It wasn’t until I was maybe halfway home that I felt her presence.’

‘The sense wasn’t physical at first,’ he went on, ‘just this really nice, strong awareness of her. And then I had the distinct sensation of her arms around me and her leaning in close against my back. It was tactile and fantastic. I felt warm. I was completely calm and happy, smiling from ear to ear. That hardly ever happens to me.’ His nervousness about the rain ebbed, and it occurred to him that Katharine was there to keep him safe on behalf of their two sons. She—her presence, her spirit—rode behind him for twenty minutes or so. ‘What I know is that it did not feel at all like a product of my imagination,” he said. ‘It felt external to me. It felt real.’

* * *

Familial and fraternal hauntings have long been central to the stories we tell, from Enkidu’s ghost in The Epic of Gilgamesh to Odysseus conferring with his slain brother-in-arms Achilles to Banquo’s discarnate presence in Macbeth to Wuthering Heights’s sorrowful Catherine. More recently, there’s erratic detective John River, who confers with his newly dead partner, Stevie, in the television series River.

In the nineteenth century, such fictive imaginings were often based on real losses as infectious disease swept through families. Harriet Beecher Stowe, for example, watched her toddler, Charley, die in a Cincinnati cholera outbreak during the summer of 1849. She began to read, as she described it, ‘of visions, of heavenly voices, of mysterious sympathies and transmissions of knowledge from heart to heart without the intervention of the senses, or what Quakers call being “baptized into the spirit” of those who are distant.’ Her husband, theologian Calvin Stowe, regularly perceived discarnates of one kind or another, according to English scholar Harold K. Bush, and mused in a letter to a friend, ‘Is it absurd to suppose that some peculiarity in the nervous system . . . may bring some men more than others into an almost abnormal contact with the spirit-World?’

In other news: You may have grown up in China if you recognize this Mark Twain story: “Just as American high school students have typically been assigned Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chinese students in the mid-20th century were given Twain’s ‘Governor,’ which became required reading soon after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, and remained so for roughly 50 years. It portrayed the American political system as comically inept and hopelessly corrupt.”

Barnaby Crowcroft reviews a personal account of a family history that sheds light on colonial Britain: “Richard Atkinson is not a professional historian, but rather a successful publisher of cookbooks. But he has adopted what was once a historian’s preferred way of addressing such matters: conducting years of painstaking archival research and writing a book reconstructing the lives and events of long-gone days. Mr Atkinson’s Rum Contract: The Story of a Tangled Inheritance began as a piece of amateur family history, but these Atkinson ancestors turned out to have surprising roles, close to the epicenter of events, through some of the most momentous episodes of British imperial history. And as the author discovered for the first time in the course of this work, they were not only Jamaican slave owners but slave traders as well—their social advancement, wealth, and political and cultural capital based, in part, ‘from the blood, sweat and lives of enslaved Africans.’ Getting to know his extended family history thus forced Richard Atkinson into a rare personal reckoning with Britain’s colonial past.”

A life of Sybille Bedford: “Within the pages of this biography, I discovered that Sybille Bedford had an affair with the sister of my father’s first wife and another with the stepfather of my mother’s stepsister. You are likely to find the same, for in matters of the heart Bedford did not stint. ‘I wish I’d written more books and spent less time being in love,’ she once said in an interview. Bedford had plenty of opportunity for both pursuits. Nevertheless, she spent her first forty years barely lifting a pen, even while sitting at the feet of other writers, Aldous Huxley and Thomas Mann famously among them. She was awe-struck by Ivy Compton-Burnett (they met, later, but the notoriously prickly Compton-Burnett gave short shrift to her younger admirer). Martha Gellhorn was just one of the many writers who gave Bedford bossy advice. Bedford was clever, widely read and serious. People encouraged her, introduced her to editors and offered her money. Yet she didn’t find her real voice until she wrote the superb A Legacy, published in 1956, by which time she was in her mid-forties. Jigsaw, her very best book, was written when she was seventy-eight.”

A history of “The Star-Spangled Banner”: “On the morning of September 14, 1814, a new flag was raised over Fort McHenry, the pentagonal structure overlooking Baltimore Harbour in Maryland. The fort had withstood nearly twenty-five hours of bombardment by the British fleet, which was now forced to retreat by the damage its ships had sustained from the fort’s guns. As the British vessels turned away, the fort’s commander, Major George Armistead, ordered the fort’s smaller storm flag to be replaced by the great garrison flag as a sign of the American victory. Once it was flying, the giant flag – 30 feet by 42 feet of stars and stripes – could be seen from as far as eight miles away, where an American lawyer was anxiously watching from an anchored ship for signs of the battle’s outcome. The sight of his nation’s flag flying in the distance moved the lawyer, Francis Scott Key, to write a poem commemorating the victory. Set to the tune of an eighteenth-century melody by the British composer John Stafford Smith (1750–1836), ‘The Defence of Fort McHenry’ would soon become better known as ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’”

In defense of William S. Burroughs: “The British critics of the 1960s who were so disgusted by Burroughs not only missed the fun but failed to recognise a true original.”

The poetry of Ted Kooser: “I have been reading the poetry of Ted Kooser for forty years, but lately I have tried to articulate and explain why I like his poems so much. Having read and reread many of his books this year, I think it is due to two things. One is his attachment to the fields, prairies and towns of the Midwest in which he grew up, born in Ames, Iowa, and moving eventually to an acreage near Garland, Nebraska. He knows the trees, plants, rivers and critters very well (especially the birds) and evokes the inhabitants very well (those he lives with and those he sees at a glance) along with, notably, the mechanical devices, machines and cars they use at home, on the streets and in the fields. This explains the second reason I admire his poems: his power of metaphorical transformation, of metamorphosis.”

Photo: Vizcaya Bridge 

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