The Ghost of Alice, d. 1919, Spanish Flu

Four hours later, I am unpacking my suitcase, putting cold things in the fridge.  My inability to leave just hours ago now seems foolish.  I make sesame noodles for my friend N. who is coming for dinner. She will bring a box filled with August’s greatest feat: fresh, ruby colored tomatoes.  It has been five months since H. died.  We trade stories about our lives in the two or three weeks since we’ve seen each other.  She checks in about the results of my blood test. She is one of the friends I’d assured I would be cured of my fatigue the minute I got on thyroid medicine.  I tell her about my conversation with D. and how facing the size of the loss of the book helped me appreciate what a loss its sudden disappearance is for me.  I feel a little guilty and overindulgent when I tell her about my grief for losing the book, which, compared to the grief of losing a husband, is so inconsequential.  But she is generous and makes no judgements. 

I check in with her about her grief, and, surprisingly, she smiles and her eyes soften and her voice brightens.

“People have been so kind,” she says. “I never expected to be so cared for.  I’ve almost no time to be lonely. My neighbor leaves lobsters on my porch.  So many people have invited me to dinner.  It will take me years to reciprocate.”  

“Oh no,” I tell her as decisively as I can, “this is the one time in your life when you get a pass from giving anything back.  It’s my bet your friends want to give freely without any idea you owe anything in return.  Your pleasure in receiving their gifts will be a gift to them.  No cooking this year!!”

“I was really worried about you before you left,” she says, circling back around, as women friends do, to me.  You didn’t seem at all like your old self.  But you seem better now. Are you sure it is just the book that was troubling you?”

N., like my friend D., is also a consultant to organizations.  She works with schools.  She knows her kids.  Like C. and like myself, N. has a graduate social work degree.   

“Well, there’s one more thing. Just before I left, I discovered a little girl on my porch!” I recount. “The little girl didn’t feel safe leaving home.  But when I told her she could come back whenever she wants to, she felt so much better! I think I am having separation anxiety.”

I can almost feel her brain buzzing as it works over that image of the little girl on the porch. Or maybe that buzzing sound is the sound of a drone as it flies over the landscape of what she knows about me, circles back, lands, delivers the data. 

“It makes sense,” she says and this time it is she who is definitive. “I remember that story you told us all earlier in the summer when we were gathered around the fire outside telling stories.   It was growing cold and dark and when it was your turn you told us about what happened to your father when your grandmother died. There was so much emotion in your voice.  It seemed to me  that though the story happened so long ago, it felt very near and present.”

Since covid put an end to gathering around a dining table, our bodies warm and comfortable, candles burning, wine glasses filled, good plates arrayed like lily pads, our group of old friends meets for pot luck outside. We gather in the evening as the sun goes down and its low rays backlight the seagulls in the harbor beyond the lawn as if they were a flotilla of floating white lanterns, all shaped like birds.  We have dinner 6’ apart in folding chairs, our food on paper plates.  Afterwards, we build a fire for warmth but even on hot nights we look forward to fire.  It’s as if we need fire, need it to summon spirit, to summon the past with its ancient rituals for healing and cleansing.  And we need it for the telling of stories.   When the sun is down, the night sky here is like it must be in the center of the universe: pitch black, celestial bodies blinking, swirling, silent. Mysterious. Time spinning in circles of past, present and future.

The night I tell the story, Jupiter and Saturn hang over us in the East like a pair of blinking eyes. It is the first time anyone in the group hears the story about how my grandmother, Alice, died in April of 1919, two weeks after my father was born, of what came to be known as the Spanish Flu.  How my grandfather, unable to care for this third child, sent my father to live with a stranger, a Mrs. Foley, known only to my grandfather from acquaintances from the Knights of Columbus, in Brooklyn.  Malnourished and barely thriving, he was retrieved from Mrs. Foley’s a year later when my grandfather remarried and brought him home. What we know from attachment theory is that by that time my father’s brain was stamped with an indelible template for relationships, a template that read this way: when you are in distress and need comforting, no one will come.  Or maybe it read this way too: the person who came once, who held you and comforted you, whose lavender smell you once knew, is never coming back. 

But that’s not the whole story.  The whole story is that my grandfather’s new wife, Katherine, made everyone in the family swear to keep secret from my father that she was not his real mother.  That secret was kept so long and so well that I did not learn about Alice Gallagher until I was in my twenties. And my father had no way to understand or grieve the experience of the death of his mother which he surely, on a somatic, preverbal level, knew all about.

“My father was always searching,” I told the group that night, “searching for the lost mother.”

That night, around the fire, the time spiral of deep space overhead, I speak her name, Alice. Summon her spirit into the circle of now.

“I think,” N says, standing in the kitchen as we get ready to eat our noodles, the same penetrating look in her eye that D. had when she asked me about my grief for the book, “some of the separation anxiety you are feeling comes from the experience of your father which you likely intuited as a little girl. Now here we are in the middle of a pandemic, again.  It’s no surprise the frightened and abandoned child appears on your porch.” 

“Umm, oh yes, of course,” I say as if I’d known it all along.  “You must be right.”  I think about what else I was obsessed with on the porch: the malnourished magnolia, the hydrangea whose soil I worried would not go deep enough, be rich enough.  I marvel at her insight.  At how she kept alive that story I told and uses it now to keep me safe. 

That’s twice in a week now that a friend’s words have moved me, healed me, listened me into an understanding of the past and its ripples on my present. I am deeply grateful.   Who needs behavioral health with friends like this?