My Hauntings
When the dark wood fell before me
And all the paths were overgrown
When the priests of pride say there is no other way
I tilled the sorrows of stone*
The Oxford dictionary describes “haunting” as having “qualities (such as sadness or beauty) that linger in the memory; not easily forgotten.” Lately I’ve been wondering about how this might fit into the familiar concept of life flashing before one’s eyes in the moments just before death. I’ve been curious about this since the time I was about eight years old, when I asked my mother about it.
“Is that true?” I asked her. “Do people’s lives flash before their eyes when they’re dying?”
I don’t know where I picked up the idea – maybe from one of my precocious readings, or a TV show. As I was still in religious school at the time, maybe a nun weaved the idea into a warning about how we should behave today.
Mom’s answer was, “Probably.”
Mom was distracted by all my younger siblings and drinking by then, but I still trusted her during the times she seemed to be in the relative clear, so to speak, and not too distraught. She was “probably” right. For years afterward as the idea arose again, I wondered by what miracle a lifetime of memories flashed like a movie ahead of an imminent death if the one dying had lived to a ripe old age, with years of complicated experiences.
I just might have a glimpse of an answer in my older age.
Once my kids were grown, and especially since retiring into the isolation of 2020, memories occasionally arrived having to do with my painful childhood and its multiple early losses. I’m going to be bluntly honest: these unbidden flickers of memory don’t have much to do with the things that happened to me; they have to do with certain decisions I made. The person I was.
As years have passed, I’ve made amends the best I could with those affected or afflicted by my careless behaviors. Some life circumstances brought out the worst in me, even as they paradoxically brought out some decent traits. For example, I recall the self-important airs I wore like a mantle winning a sales contest because I ventured into territories in the city no one else would go. I must be very brave and special. I met brilliant people everywhere who talked to me, and helped me understand more about life, others, and myself. That was the real gift. It should have been enough those young adult years. But at various points in a high-pressure career, I got caught in achievement traps over rewards that in the end, I know didn’t matter. I knew it then, but it was hard to stop. I wanted to be amazing. I practiced the role at every opportunity to make up for the lost years when I had no real direction or example of “success.” I took other people’s ideas about it as if they were my own.
One December day I arrived home, exhausted from a whirlwind trip to see customers, and delivered my fourth child just a few hours later. Dedication, right? Amazing.
I’m not going to list my private grievances against myself. Those who know me well know the details, and others can guess. My mistakes don’t hold me back; I am for the most part a free woman now. But sometimes I’m still haunted by past decisions when I made excuses for myself. Good minds tend to excel at self-justification. “I’m making up for lost time because I had no functional parents…I was poor…I’ll take on this very visible project and win an award (or scholarship, or grant, or some other perk) because I have a lot to prove.”
I had glimmers back then, conscious ones, that I was veering downward despite the apparent upward trajectory. I entered therapy at least once specifically to try to get past personal ambitions that signaled one thing to the outside world, and something else to me: “I am acting against my value system,” I explained to a counselor. “People like me, and help me be successful – but we are bonded on the basis of sometimes genuine…sometimes artificial friendship.”
“Manipulative?” the therapist asked.
Yes, I affirmed. “But I am the breadwinner, I have to support the family…” I have to do this and that.
What I’ve just described is a dilemma common to many, but my hauntings encompass more, before and after the time I became a functional adult. To be clear, I forgive myself for what I had to do, didn’t do, or chose to do, before I knew better or became brave enough to change course. How I feel about myself now is not the point here: it’s understanding that there are some paths I chose that did not bring out the best in me, as they brought the attention I seemed to crave, that I had mistaken for love. Perhaps others can relate. Still others may not grapple at all with the struggle to resolve the paradoxes they’ve encountered in choosing life-paths. All I can relate is my own story, and what I’m thinking now.
These days I think the idea of “your own life flashing” is probably not an actual pre-death experience but a late-life cavalcade of scenes, unbidden, that draw you into your own shadows again. Unpleasant as it is, remembering who you once were is not necessarily a bad thing. Exploring the darker side of the self and facing bad memories without too much trepidation builds courage necessary for a more fruitful old age – regardless of circumstances. Note I did not say “easier” – it’s not fun growing old, and the current world order does not exist as such by anyone’s definition. We’re sitting in our own messes. We can contribute our piece and our opinions as we wish, well into our advanced years, but peace of mind – well, that’s priceless, especially if the old body ain’t what it used to be, or if it is outright failing. We can pretend we are in control until the very end, but along with age comes a vulnerability we just can’t really imagine until we’re there. All this, to be figured out on our own with fear and trembling, to paraphrase the Psalmist.
The price of authenticity and the pervasive peace we can find in it, is grief…as we acknowledge the times we frankly failed. To be aligned with truth is to know more we really want to know about self and the world. It’s to become intimately familiar with our own capacity for error as we strengthen our methods for recovery. This is what the hauntings have come to mean to me – more practice dealing with inevitable disappointments. In the practice of humility I am free in all possible ways to discover life anew and see what it has to teach me. Makes life larger, more encompassing. It’s a beautiful massive mess of a tapestry where the broken threads become lost in the pattern, which for all we know, was intended as part of some grand design.
Maybe it really is “already written,” like the new Beatles’ song that just came out, featuring voices and sounds of the past in ethereal unison.
Back several years when I lived in Chico, California, I used to walk along a creek that was bordered by a stony path. One cloudy day I started the walk a bit agitated thinking I might end up walking miles in rain. One of my students happened to be walking his dog from the opposite direction. He greeted me with a smile and a quick hello. I waved in passing as an unbidden thought flashed: “What would you think of me if you knew what a confused person I’d been at your age?” Damn haunting stuck to me like glue, as I considered my fraudulent nature.
This was so dark I decided to go all in. I made my solitary walk that day all about the hauntings. Every time I thought of something I wished I could do over, or someone I hurt or otherwise failed, I picked up a stone and remembered the situation in as much gory detail as I could recall. When no one was near me, I talked to myself and invited a few phantom spirits into the discussion. It was California, I could do what I wanted, and no one would care. I wept a little and grieved a lot.
Soon my hand was weighted with stones, as you can see above.
Eventually I got around to the bridge. I started to throw the stones one by one into the creek running beneath it. It would have been nice to recall each of the hauntings one more time, but between the stones in my hand the overflow in my pockets, it just wasn’t possible.
From time to time, I still entertain occasional hauntings just before I go to sleep, or when I am in some sort of meditative state. I’ll let them parade on by, and when they threaten to pull me in deeper than I want to go, I quiet my active mind. I know some Buddhist chants that help. I might sing a song to soothe the hungry ghosts of the past: Hello darkness my old friend. I might reach out to the memory of one I have wronged, now beyond my reach, singing:
And now and then
If we must start again
Well, we will know for sure
That I will love you…
I will now publicly thank the Beatles for their miraculous posthumous offering. In so doing they have bridged the biggest gap of all, and given me much to think about in terms of possibility. Can it possibly be we are revealing ourself through time as some sort of story? Or gift, to be opened later long after our patience for this painful world has run out?
I love to consider what’s possible, beyond everything we think we know.
*Loreena McKennitt, Dante’s Prayer