A Brief Encounter With The Dead
This post was originally created on March 15, 2023.
A personal essay about an unlikely interaction that occured between my younger self and a ghost from my family’s past. A true story.
"Little Girl Talking to a Ghost" by mimzylove
It was supposed to be a run-of-the-mill awkward family gathering when we first met. Every one of these parties would follow a specific and predictable pattern of events, which is as follows; First, I would ask my mom if I really had to go. If my plea failed, which it usually did, I would enter the party and say hello to the few people that I recognized. My mom would then bring me over to strangers and say “do you remember *insert distant relatives name here*?”, to which I was given the task of deciding to either offend this person with blunt honesty or spare their ego by saying I did remember them, when in fact I did not. Regardless of my answer, the person in question would respond with “I remember you when you were this big!”, gesturing to a height much shorter than I was at the present moment. When my mother grew tired of show-ponying me around to second cousins and friends of friends, I would grab some snacks and subtly blend into the background of the event, only emerging from my reclusive ways when it was time to say goodbye to people that I never even said hello to. That being said, this party diverged from the typical course of action right after having a few of the whole "this big!” conversations.
Not expecting what was to come, I was mid-scoping out the room, searching for the lucky corner that I thought would be hosting me and my plate of puffy cheetos for the next 45 minutes. Before I had the chance to choose, my mother called me over to join her with an older looking man. I assumed that another conversation with an obscure relative was inbound, so I braced myself to get my cheeks pinched or for some other thing that would make me want to go home to ensue. This interaction was peculiar from the start, since my mother didn’t ask if I remembered the man and he didn’t give me the “this big!” ordeal. I could sense her hesitation as she uttered the following words;
“Erica, this is your Grandfather”.
For a moment, the world became still. My apathetic demeanor shifted to utter confusion as I racked my brain, trying to understand how a dead person was standing before me, arm extended to shake my hand. Was Jesus not the only man on this Earth to come back from the dead? Before I could verbalize these thoughts, my mom shot me a look as if to say “I’m sorry, I lied, I’ll explain later”. Understanding my mother’s non-verbal message, I shook his hand and did my best to carry a somewhat normal sounding conversation.
He had a less than moderate interest in what I had to say, seemingly too eager to speak about his own life to care about the past twelve years of mine that he missed. He became interested in our conversation only when he brought up Susan, who I learned was his new fiancé. He pulled a laminated photo of them out from his wallet, passing it around for both of us to inspect. The photo was of him and Susan on a cruise from which they had just returned. It wasn't just a normal photo though, it was one taken by the professional photographers on the boat that you would have to wait in the really long customer service line to pay an absurdly high price for. He put it back into its designated spot in his wallet and we finished up our brief meeting, which was the first and last time I ever saw him. I guess Jesus can have his title back as “Sole Resurrectee”, because Grandpa Rigney did not pull off this feat as I had imagined. The 40 years that I thought he was six feet underground were actually occupied by a simple life that occured in a lake house two towns over from us.
After our encounter, I kept thinking about the photo of him and Susan. My memory of his face in real life has turned into a mirage of shapes and colors as time has passed, but the photo of him and Susan remains vividly clear. I can still feel the bubbles in the lamination, edges curled and slightly browned from dust particles that accumulated where he misaligned the sticky paper. It was a struggle of mine for a while, trying to understand why my mother and I didn’t merit a laminated photo in his wallet. My anger and frustration, more for my mother’s sake than my own, has since cooled into a sense of understanding and forgiveness. Although he clearly cared about Susan, he would never have the capacity to care about his daughter and granddaughter in the ways that we deserved, due to his struggles with drug addiction early on in my mother’s childhood.
We had no control over the choices that Grandpa Rigney made. Over time, I learned that his choices did not reflect on the quality of love that we deserved. I had to relearn this lesson a multitude of times, since he unfortunately was not the only absent figure in my life that I had to learn to forgive. Many of my adult family members- aka most of my aunts and uncles- also struggled with addiction or were involved in a criminal lifestyle that my parents wanted to shelter me from, resulting in the loss of relationships with most of my family members.
In the time I spent craving love and connection from people who couldn’t provide what I was yearning for, I have been able to find some of the best friends and their families, who have taken me in and cared for me like I was one of their own. Sometimes, it's not that someone doesn't love you, it's just that they have their own issues preventing them from being able to express it in a way that you deserve. While my mother and I are now able to laugh about our encounter with Grandpa Rigney, it has made me realize that unconditional love and care can come from other places and people besides your family. It has taught me to reach out to people and form meaningful connections with them, rather than wait for people who cannot change. Most importantly, it has also taught me to fact check my mom the next time she claims someone has passed away.
