Memento Mori

Bingeing a must-watch show and ghosts are besieging me.

Spirit photograph of a woman, ca. 1865. Tintype. George Eastman Museum, gift of Donald K. Weber (via Wikimedia Commons)

These past weeks, they have hovered, wraiths, the familiar and the unfamiliar. Noisy, demanding my attention, distracting me. Apparitions and spirit creatures.

I blame George Saunders’ swarming ghostly cast in Lincoln in the Bardo, still running through my mind months after finishing it (I wrote here about this incredible book). I blame The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka (populated by the spirit victims of Sri Lanka’s cruel and conflict-ridden history; I’m halfway through it), and one of my favourite books, Beyond Black, Hilary Mantel’s funny-tragic-fabulous story of the psychic Alison (“Occasionally some oddball breaks through saying he’s Jesus. But I don’t know, Al said, there’ll be something in his manner – you just know he’s not from ancient Palestine”).

I blame one of the best series I’ve watched this year: I’ve been buried in it for a fortnight, sadly finished all episodes now, but it will propel my imagination for a long time to come.

And something else too: within my orbit, it has been an uncommonly and distressingly busy year for death. So many have left this year, family, friends, lovers, neighbours, youngish and older. In late May alone, two funerals in two days in two different cities. One a great old friend, another my uncle’s, a state funeral at which I delivered a eulogy on behalf of my aunt and cousins.

Before there is time to parse the emotions surrounding one departure, there is another, so much still to consider, so many complicated feelings yet to be looked at.

Part of me is waiting for another phone call, another death announcement, someone else, gone. Part of me is feeling deeply, awfully, anxiously mortal. I am remembering my late father and his rough, amateur memento mori, remember that you die … T-shirts he had printed for himself after he learned he had a cancer that would, a specialist told him, “shorten your life”. My clever, witty father’s attempt to face his end with a sense of humour.