“The Six Stages of Grief” • by Christopher Degni

I live with the ghost of my mother.

Every morning I hear her practice her ritual: making the coffee, straightening my apartment, sitting at the kitchen table. Strange, as she never did those things when she used to visit me. Perhaps maintaining a routine helps her accept her new lot.

My father calls often. I miss her, he says, and I agree. We all miss her. But, he says. I cut him off. We’ve been through this before, and I don’t want to go through it again. She’s not coming back, I say. I wish he would stop torturing himself with false hope. Losing hope is the easiest thing to do, and the best. That way you are never disappointed.

The experts talk about the five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance—but what they don’t admit is the stages were invented whole cloth from nothing. An unsubstantiated hypothesis. I’ve been through my own five stages: anger, rage, blinding rage, rage, and anger. And numbness. Numbness is the last stage. Six stages.

Her presence would soothe me, you’d think, but it doesn’t. She remains close, but it is not the same as when she lived. It’s her, but different. It’s to be expected, though; people are changed by lesser experiences than death.

I’m not and never have been in denial.

Sometimes she sleeps next to me, and I can feel her back up against mine. It provides no warmth.

Who would you bargain with anyway? It makes no sense. I don’t think you’d want to be cutting deals with the entities necessary at that point. Maybe that’s just me.

Living with a ghost is like living with a cat. You see it out of the corner of your eye: a flicker in the mirror, a movement in the shadow in the corner of the room, the sound of claws on a scratching post. Sometimes you hear unnatural noises in the other room, but when you investigate, nothing is out of place.

I also have a cat. She does not get along with my mother. They are never in the same room together.

I brought a boyfriend back to the apartment once. My mother didn’t approve of him, and she made it known. He knew something was happening, but he didn’t understand what. I wasn’t going to tell him. We were too new, and he would run screaming. He ran screaming anyway.

I know I sound crazy. I’m sane enough to know that.

She talks to me still. Sometimes she uses the wind. If I am very quiet, I can hear whispered words in the draft from a window that doesn’t completely close. I do not understand what she is telling me, but I hear the timbre of her voice in the words. I suppose she must have nothing to do on the other side, with all the time she spends with me.

My phone rings. It is my father. I am ready for another conversation I do not want to have. Another battle. Such is the way of things.

They found your mother, he says.

I can feel her presence starting to gather, like an explosion in reverse, preparing to envelop me as my father finally gives me news of closure.

Her body, I say.

No, he replies. His voice has a slight tremble. She is alive, he says. They found her alive.

But I feel her right behind me.

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Christopher Degni is a 2019 graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop. He writes about the magic and the horror that lurk just under the surface of everyday life. He lives south of Boston with his wife (and his demons, though we don't talk about those). You can find more of his work in NewMyths.com, Sherlock Holmes and the Occult Detectives, 99 Tiny Terrors, 99 Fleeting Fantasies, and of course, here on Stupefying Stories.

 

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