Ghosts and ‘Our Own Dear Dead’ November 1, 2022
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary , trackback
I’ve always struggled to love ghosts. The only accounts that I find even half convincing have phantoms on a perpetual carousel of tedium: walking up that road, jumping off that bridge, creaking through that door… Then when ghosts are more daring – Chris in our podcast this month introduced me to an Icelandic housewife zombie who cooked in the buff – I enjoy the colour but laugh silently inside. I mean come on…
However, what if ghosts are not ‘ghosts’ but our loved ones? I first came across death aged eight. Ever since then my life has been, naturally enough, punctuated by occasional deaths: ranging from the horrendous and unexpected (a boy decapitated on a railway line) to the expected (‘good’ deaths of elderly people who have lived rich lives). As I grow older the number of dead have grown and while finding the idea of life after death instinctively silly, I do have a sense of a growing community of the departed off in the margins. Their weight (a burden?) and their influence (on me) continue. One day – if I’m lucky enough to live another twenty years – I will wake up and find that most of my loved ones are no more, that the community of the dead is bigger than the community of living.
I’m already experiencing something like this in the village where I live in Italy. About 800 people dwell in these streets and, having spent ten years here, I’ve got to know perhaps a hundred. Most of these new friends were elderly – the old are more likely to be out and about and are readier to swap some words with an outsider. At least half, though, are now dead. When I walk through the village I see the living, but also am constantly reminded of those who are no more, but who ‘were’ until very recently. The boundary between life and death is not as stable as I would have hoped. I sometimes see people who I thought were dead (but were not) or discover to my horror that x or y died a year ago, while I thought they were cutting stones or digging potatoes down the road.
We generally keep a strong brick wall between our loved dead and ‘ghosts’. ‘Ghosts’ are scary, alien and dangerous: the loved dead (even when they speak or appear to their dear ones) are – in almost all the cases I’ve heard – unthreatening and even beneficent. Many people – Chris in the podcast recalls the work of Gillian Bennett – just don’t think of their loved dead (even when they appear at the bottom at the bed and talk) as anything supernatural at all. They are just a natural continuation of the domestic order: as unthreatening as washing up liquid or leaves in the gutter. Yet this relationship with ‘our dead’ surely stands, in historical terms, at the very root of almost all supernatural beliefs and experiences.
Other thoughts on this: drbeachcombing AT gmail DOT com
