Wraith

I talked to Marc Cherry, my brother’s guitar teacher and friend, last week. And while I was talking to him I had a flashback to the day of my brother’s funeral.

It was after the funeral and the cemetery, and everyone had gathered at the house. I was sitting on the floor in our family room, doing I don’t remember what, when I heard the tinkling of ice cubes above me, and simultaneously felt someone sink down next to me on the floor.

It was a family friend, well-known to me. Also well-known was her propensity to drink too much at times. This was one of those times. She was holding a club glass with ice and a brown liquid in it, and she smelled like alcohol.

She draped her arm over me, leaned in, and, said “You have to write about your brother, or everyone will forget about him.”

I felt fear, and alarm, and a complete inability to handle the situation. I didn’t know how to respond, either to her too-closeness, or what she said. In my memory, I sat there, frozen.

And then, Marc was there, having spotted something amiss, lifting me up the elbow, and ushering me elsewhere.

I was so grateful. It may be the only thing I remember from that gathering.

And, to be honest, it haunts me.

I’m going to take a guess and say that one of the worst things for anyone who has lost someone close to them is the idea that they’ve been erased from the planet, all their specialness, lost, unseen, forevermore.

There’s a great line that speaks to this from J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. (Sibling loss is all over Salinger’s work, by the way, though to my knowledge he did not lose a sibling.) In it, Buddy Glass talks about how he continues to pay for a private phone line he and his older brother, Seymour, who is dead, shared. The reason, he says: “It’s…essential to my inner harmony to see Seymour’s listing in the goddam phone book every year. I like to browse the G’s with confidence.”

If you’ve lost someone, perhaps someone you’ve yet to delete out of your phone contacts, you get it.

What this woman said was the stuff of nightmares for anyone bereaved.

And I was barely 14 at the time, and in no way on a career path, much less to one as a writer.

And yet…here I am.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m grateful that I’m a writer and have the tools to give expression to both what I think, and to bring my brother back a little in this way, thereby allowing others to know him.

Also, writing helps me process. There’s a James Baldwin quote that was floating around Facebook recently that read: “When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know.”

And I was like, bingo….

I have had a lot of therapy, at this point, but I’d have needed and had a lot more of it if I didn’t have writing.

But I look back on what that woman said and wonder if, like one of Macbeth’s witches, she put a curse on me, in that vulnerable moment, that I’m still compelled to carry out. Or if I would have done this anyway.

That’s the part that haunts me a bit.

Is my writing about my brother free will, or something I was tasked with many years ago?

Is it good, or bad, that I write about him still?

I could overthink (and write) this. I could say that Macbeth’s witches told him just enough truth to elicit the worst parts of his ego, or, they told him enough to set the stage for him to make choices—moral or otherwise—about the path forward. And I could try to find the links.

But I don’t know if that’s relevant. Or worth the energy. It’s just that think-y processing thing that happens when I’m writing, i.e. what Baldwin talked about.

But it’s interesting to me that when I think back on that scene, the word “wraith” comes to mind.

The definition, per Google is “a ghost or ghostlike image of someone, especially one seen shortly before or after death.” In later iterations of the definition, it’s suggested that the term mostly refers to evil spirits who have unfinished business in “the mortal realm.”

It fits Macbeth’s witches, but not this person.

This woman was very much alive during this encounter, though she is no longer alive. And I don’t think she was evil. And yet, that word….that is what my brain keeps reaching for when I think back on this encounter.

I’m not sure that there’s an answer to this question of mine, or whether, ultimately, it really matters. It’s just that the older I get, the more I wonder about those fleeting memories, which seem like they should be small, or forgettable, in the grand scheme….and yet they are what the brain hangs on to.

Is it a sensory thing? All the senses lit up, ergo it was cemented in my memory? Or was it that significant? I’ll never know. Meanwhile, I guess (I know) I will keep writing. And it seems I will keep writing about Ted.