I am not actually talking about REAL ghosts. However, I have found that over the past few months the loss of my wife, Linda, has brought up thoughts and feelings about other deaths. Not all of my deceased friends and relatives, but specifically my daughter, Katie, and in the past few weeks a miscarriage we suffered in 1985 in Switzerland of a child in the first trimester. That I must admit surprised me.,

In Katie’s case, one would think that I had dealt with that by writing three Fantasy novels, collectively ‘The Ur Legend’. But those were attempts to give her a life she never got a chance to live. And Ur was a Highly fictional character. But Katie was difficult to mourn in a traditional way because of the way her birth accident presented. It was believed that her umbilical cord was too short and when she turned it restricted the flow of blood and oxygen to her brain. As I have probably recounted, she was born dead and then resuscitated. She lived seven months. The condition was HIE, or hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy. Basically it fried her entire brain. She was cortically blind and deaf, had high tone/low tone cerebral palsy and was subject to seizures that required steroids. It was ugly.

So much of Loss involves the retrieval of and reflection on memories. But in Katie’s case there were almost none, for she was, though this may sound a bit brutal, a turnip. Nonetheless I have begun to think of her more and more as a person, not just a fiction, and the type of young lady she would have become.

As for the miscarriage, I had rarely given it a thought, though many people grieve as much over that brutal event as the death of an infant. Maybe that sounds thoughtless of me but that is the truth of it. I always thought that child would have been a boy but who knows? If a boy we would have named him Oliver or Olivia if a girl. So I now refer to the child simply as Ollie.

Loss results in many behaviors that might be considered flaky, except to those who have experienced them. In my TV room (which is a real 50s size TV room about the size of a broom closet, with space for only a 34″ television), I have what I call my ‘couch family’. Linda is a beige blanket draped over a chair. Katie is a purple pillow on a couch of the same color and Ollie is a little polkadot throw pillow. After dinner is what I call my ‘stupid time’. No reading, no writing and no singing. Just watching every episode of every Star Trek ever made, a Hallmark on the weekends, PBS series from Nova to All Creatures Great and Small, and stream a few series that engage my interest. Just finished ‘Six Feet Under’. Pretty apropos huh? Often a line of dialogue or a beat in the story will spark a thought and I will hit pause and talk about it to my ‘furniture family’. Sometimes I cry. That is unusual since Linda and I were never criers and often said we would cry twice a year for practice!

I think it most interesting that I have begun to have a relationship with my two dead kids after all this time. Loss works in mysterious ways.