As I’ve mentioned here before, my dead mother shows up a lot in my dreams. Last night I was stuck in a prolonged dream about the aftermath of her death, which I wrote a fucking book about already (you can read for free here). I don’t see how there’s anything more for my brain to do about it. What can it solve? (Okay, there are genuine mysteries like what did she die from?? And what happened to her ashes?? But dead is dead.)
I often imagine conversations with her. Explaining how things are now, showing her around or describing my day to a ghost. Sometimes I try to imagine her older, as she would be today. But most of the time she’s still a mother to a teenage girl, frozen in memories slowly melting out of existence. I grew to be a whole 2 inches taller than her (I am 5ft 1in, she was 4ft 11in, sorry everyone who uses normal measurements, I cannot do maths, Americans can only do one math) but her height in my memory is often taller. The same way I once entered an abandoned house that used to be the home of our neighbors, and it felt like walking around a doll’s house.
But then when I got to France, I started having conversations with friends in the same way. Friends who were not dead. Explaining how things were done around the house and around the village. As I walked through the vineyards and wooded paths on the hills nearby I’d run over and over in my head imagined explanations of what a dhuys was and how to pronounce dhuys. Maybe rehearsing for a future day of reuniting. Or maybe just to hear myself make sentences.
I’m not always having conversations with friends or family. Sometimes it’s declarations in imagined international courts where I have to explain my actions because we’re all being surveilled at all times and they’re going to be like “did you or did you not buy a pair of corduroy trousers you do not need?” and then I have to explain the weather and climate in northern France and how I had no other trousers. Other times I’m talking to new people, a blank mannequin of a person on the same long-distance train journey who is eager to hear about me and my life.
Maybe this is a normal manifestation of coping with the loss of human connections. Maybe it’s bonkers. Maybe I will come out of confinement with my conversation abilities as sharp as before (assuming they were sharp to begin with) or maybe I will realize I like talking to my imagined versions of people I know more than I do the real person and being with them will be like walking around that abandoned house that feels way too small. Except for mom, I have no alternative to the imagined for her. Because she’s dead. (Dad’s dead too, but I don’t much talk to him, he was a dickhead.)
Am I mourning their deaths or the death of a part of myself in “our” idle chit-chat? Or just drowning out mental tinnitus with mental chatter? Is talking to imagined other people the same as talking to yourself? Why would anyone care if I have a few corduroy pairs of trousers? And isn’t blogging about your trousers done on the premise that someone or someones out there would care about your few pairs of corduroy pants?
Yes.
Maybe finding real people to be in my life in a real way will push the ghosts away. But I don’t know if I want them to, because the ghosts make really great listeners, just like the imagined audience for my corduroy pants comforts me. The real thing might turn out to be disappointing. Or dead.
