It may surprise you to know I do believe in ghosts.
But believing and knowing what they are are two different things. Belief does not mean I understand what ghosts are, the motivations and desires. It’s like saying you believe in God. How many of us can say the really understand them?
What are they? Are they really the spirits of the dead somehow trapped, unable to move on? Are they manifestations of our own minds, parts of ourselves that break away under trauma or stress? Or maybe something else, something as unknowable as a distant god.
Regardless of who they came to be, one this is clear. They are the image of a person at the time of their death, an interactive piece of mourning. Never changing, forever fixed at that one moment in time. In this we have the advantage.
Whatever traumas, whatever hardships, we live on. We move past that moment and find that bad times do not last. We find endurance and resilience in our struggles making us stronger. We can….”boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces one, and one does not disappoint us…” Romans 5:3-5
I say this because I wonder if the dead can? Fixed at the moment of death with no way of ‘living though’ the trauma, how can they get to that moment of acceptance and reflection?
Is this why they haunt the living? They need us to help them through? To finish the unfinished business? To find justice, retribution, revenge?
If that is true, shouldn’t our response be, not fear and loathing for their state, but empathy and acceptance? Like learning first aid, should we all learn afterlife counselling?
My problem is…once we’ve worked out why they are still with us and what they need to move on…do I want them to? Do I want to live without their presence?
I believe in ghosts all right. I just don’t know what to do about it.
A Strange Life 