More Ghosts

August 27, 2020

The next day after reckoning with the ghost of Alice, I open my telemed screen to the faces of a couple,* who, like many couples, are together far more often than precovid.  So far away now, precovid time.  She looks, as my mother used to say, “fit to be tied” and he looks downcast and agitated.  “I never have any privacy,” she says.  “He wants to be by my side all the time.  Even if I go out for a walk now, he wants to come with me, even if I’m in the next room he gets agitated and follows me. I can’t see any reason why he’s so agitated.  I’m right here. He just wants to control me.”  Which is precisely what I would be feeling if I were in her shoes and had not the insights and experiences of the last few days.

“I’ve got this one!” I say to myself. 

I move towards his anxiety, feeling gentle, soft, capable.  So many people summoned into the spacetime we share at that moment.  I bring N and Alice and Bridget and her family and my friends from the fire pit, and my own mother and all the people who have kept me feeing safe.  All of whom hold me in a circle of protection.    I bring my father and his search for Alice.  I even bring the mystery of the night sky.

“I think I have some idea what’s happening for you now,” I say to P. whose first name really doesn’t’ begin with P.  “I think you are having separation anxiety, and I think it’s particularly strong because covid’s danger is busting open the room in your unconscious that stores the past fears of your family, their griefs, their helplessness.  Let me tell you a story.” 

I know that P. too has ghosts from a few generations ago.  First, I tell him about mine, about the last week and what I was feeling.  Then I tell him I know he has family members who perished in concentration camps in Germany during WW2.  I know the generation who survived, his parents, did not process all this loss and fear.  I remember that he’s told me his mother was extremely anxious. 

“It makes sense,” he says to me, looking a little stunned as I did when N. made that connection for me. 

I tell R. (also not really her first initial)  how hard it must be to be followed and tracked by P, but if it’s possible, if she could summon an image of the fears and experiences from the past which covid has whistled up into his present, perhaps it will allow her to respond not to this guy (who looks like a grownup and should be behaving like one) but to the frightened ghosts of his ancestors who live just over the rise of consciousness.

I suggest that he try to summon in his mind all the people who care about him and keep him safe now. I urge him to ground himself in the present, the blue sky, the gardens around his house.  

“Don’t forget to put me in your circle of protection,” I say just before we hang up. 

A few hours later, reading yet another example of how T. is subverting democracy,  turning us more and more towards a dictatorship, I think, of course, P’s ancestors are here, beside him, telling him to be careful, to pay attention.   America is a terrifying place right now, not only because of covid.  There are frightening political forces lurking in the dark. 

*This couple has read this piece and given permission for me to publish it here.