ghost ships
“I’ll never know and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.”
—DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #71: The Ghost Ship That Didn’t Carry Us
As a kid, I used to have nightmares. Terrifying, vivid nightmares that would wake me with ice in my veins, gasping for breath. I would sleep with the blankets wrapped tightly around me, fearful that any exposed body parts would be an invitation for demons to snatch me from my bed in the dead of night. After I watched The Phantom of the Opera for the first time, I had visions of the phantom materializing in my bedroom, rising out of the floor in a plume of smoke. And while I didn’t fully believe in ghosts or phantoms, I would sometimes feel that fear prickling up whenever I was alone.
Nightmares, after all, are just anxieties—expressions of fear locked away in dark places, hidden from your conscious mind, black and tightly coiled nervously like piano wire. Profound loss frequently manifests in our worst anxieties; it is far too easy to be seduced by insecurities into guilt or shame. A word for this kind of loss does not exist—“trauma” is too much, “regret” too simplistic. The word “loss” itself feels simultaneously melodramatic and inadequate to capture the broad spectrum of emotion. There’s no distinction between death claiming a life and having someone suddenly cease to exist in your world. The empty space feels cavernously lonely, the absence a hollow ache in your bones.
I don’t know when I stopped having nightmares, but I’ve realized that they’ve never truly left me. The ghosts are always there; they’ve made homes in my head, and it was simply that I became accustomed to the weight of carrying them. They are what keep me wide awake at 3 am in a glass-fragile state of paralysis, even when my eyelids are too heavy to keep open.
They feel different now. The nightmares of my childhood were panicked, heart-seizing; but the ghosts of today have none of this urgency. Instead they are more melancholy than anything else, slowly floating along like a shadow, all-consuming. A fog settling over the ocean, inexplicably unnerving and a chill that’s impossible to ignore.
We are all haunted by something one way or another, things we carry with us through our lives. A song, a sensation, an idea. An empty street can be so imbued with memories it can bring you to tears; a smoky sunset at dusk can feel like an echo of a former life, a part of yourself you can’t get back.
There’s a scene from The Haunting of Hill House that I think about a lot. The youngest child of the family, Nell, is haunted by a mysterious apparition of a “bent-neck lady” throughout her childhood; as an adult, she is driven mad by the ghosts only she can see and the inability to distinguish imagination from reality, and she commits suicide by hanging herself. It’s revealed as her body falls through the limits of time and space that she was the bent-neck lady, haunting her younger self.
Grief often feels this way, shadows lurking at the corners of our memories, darkening the present. It’s speculated that Nell’s character is a manifestation of the final stage of grief: acceptance. She is resigned to suffer, and upon rewatching, that heaviness is present even in her happier moments—playing make-believe with her sister as a child, accepting a marriage proposal with stars in her eyes as a young woman, dancing with her older brother at her wedding.
We are haunted by the things we do to other people, but just as often by the things done to us. We live with these ghosts as casualties of inescapable circumstance, in continuous pursuit of answers, of anything that offers clarity. I think that’s what leads people to religion and astrology and mid-life crises—it’s pure, unfiltered craving; a desperation to feel better by any means possible, a hunger for something that makes sense when everything feels like it’s falling apart.
It’s difficult to process in the aftermath, because it is solving a puzzle with some pieces missing. They say hindsight is 20/20, but no one ever gives you advice for a blindside with the absence of red flags, happiness cut short by sudden collapse. You’re left with nothing more than questions. When you did everything you could, what is left? How do you begin to reconcile the pain of loss with nothing but good memories? The cognitive dissonance alone is too much. In isolation, sadness fills all of the empty spaces until it feels suffocating. Reminders still cut like a knife every time, and you begin the arduous process of carefully stitching it up all over again.
The weight of our own expectations can be crushing. The space between who we are and who we thought we would be is something we navigate without a map. What feels most haunting about these ghost ships, these remnants of another life that we could have had, is that they feel stolen. The pandemic has taken so much from us all, but what feels especially devastating is that it happened so suddenly. We were tossed into a jarring state of negotiating with if only. If only we had appreciated what we had. If only we had time to prepare. If only we’d known it was the last time we would eat at a restaurant, dance in a dark and dirty bar, melt into a crowd with the music in front of us. It doesn’t feel like an organic loss; it feels disorienting, like waking up adrift in the middle of an ocean of grief. Sometimes you can give everything you have and still come up short, and it feels so close but not quite. This knowledge should make you feel better; it should ease the pain or make it easier to bear, but of course it doesn’t. It cuts just as deep.
I’m writing this now because even though some stories don’t need to be heard, they deserve to be told. And to remind myself that the pain is better than the alternative. The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference, and only indifference can lay these ghosts to rest. That’s the simple answer. But real life is much more complex, and I’ve always believed that if you really care about something or someone, the ghosts are always there. It’s not necessarily a problem to be fixed, but a truth we eventually accept. The ghosts don’t define us but inevitably become part of us, and we grow around them like flowers over bones that have retreated into the earth. And just because something is haunted doesn’t mean it is irreparably broken.
Forgiveness is a virtue often positioned as a moral responsibility to other people, a tenuous gift given with the broken pieces of your heart in your hand. But it’s not really for other people—it’s a grace you give to yourself. The freedom to let go of the hurt and the anger is a gift for you and you alone, but it’s hard to swallow. Really damn hard.
As the Dear Sugar letter suggests, ghost ships are not things meant to be lingered upon, but wistfully acknowledged as they sail on past into the sunset. That’s the best we can do.
