When I was growing up I lived with a ghost. I know some people will think that sounds crazy. I know some people will think I imagined it. Yet the experience was real.
Our house-ghost wasn’t an apparition, it was a presence: being alone in a room, then knowing someone had entered although no-one was there; sitting still and quiet for as long as it took for whatever it was to leave. Time and time again my mother declared there were no such things as ghosts. The dead don’t come back to earth, she’d say, because those in Heaven don’t want to leave and those in Hell aren’t allowed out. She was trying to convince herself as much as me – she felt the ghost’s presence, too.
When we eventually moved (driven out by the Council, not by the ghost) a neighbour confided that the previous tenants had a Catholic Priest visit to perform an exorcism. It made me feel better, less weird, about the whole thing.
In The Beginner’s Goodbye Aaron’s wife, Dorothy, is killed when a tree falls on their house. Almost a year later, Dorothy appears on the sidewalk outside their house. She doesn’t stay very long but Aaron “didn’t feel as if she was abandoning me. I knew, somehow, she would come again as soon as she could”. He’s right. After that first visit Dorothy starts to turn up in lots of different places: at the farmer’s market, on the street where Aaron’s office is, walking to the post office, in the shopping mall. Aaron believes Dorothy has returned because “we simply missed each other too much”. (He doesn’t want to ask her. “It would kill me if she left. I had already gone through that once. I didn’t think I could do it all over again”.) But as her visits get longer they begin to talk, or rather bicker, as they had done when she was alive.
If you follow my blog, you’ll know my previous post was on Grief is the Thing With Feathers, about a man whose wife dies suddenly. The Beginner’s Goodbye explores the same themes – love, marriage, loss, grief, hope – but in a very different way. Tyler’s masterstroke is to leave the question of whether Dorothy is a ‘real’ ghost unresolved. On the one hand, it occurs to Aaron that “in all probability, neither one of us had actually spoken during our encounters. Our conversations had played out silently in my head.” On the other hand if Aaron has imagined the visits “how could she have said those things that she knew and I didn’t. That she had refused a better job for my sake. That she had hidden her feelings for my sake…” There are other suggested explanations. Aaron’s builders talks of “unfinished business”, Aaron’s friend that “if you know them well enough, if you’ve listened to them closely enough while they were still alive, you might be able to imagine what they would tell you even now.”
Rating: *** Highly Recommended
PS. I ‘found’ The Beginner’s Goodbye in the waiting room of my local station. I was reading Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief at the time. I will return it, though!
whatcathyread 