We Will Live Like Our Ghosts Will Live

Who doesn't have unfinished business in a world like this?

When I was a kid I was a terrible sleeper. I can’t count the nights of my childhood I spent in the darkness, doing that terrible mental dance that we all have to do from time to time, where you know if you could just stop thinking you would fall right asleep, but you can’t stop thinking about how you’re not asleep yet.

Sometimes I would deal with this by getting up and out of bed to go tell my parents or a babysitter that, nope, I still wasn’t asleep. (This was a real treat for them, I imagine. By the third or fourth time admitting my failure to become unconscious I was usually in tears.) Sometimes I would try to be more stoic, forcing myself not to move, to lay there and try to concentrate on my breathing. This typically had a higher success rate than the other option but was more work than just melting down and hoping someone older than me could fix it.

One of these nights stands out sharper than the rest. It was the first time that not being able to sleep didn’t upset me, exactly, although it was still unsettling. What made this one different was that we were on vacation in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, which you probably know about for the same reason everyone else does: it was the site of the bloodiest battle of the American Civil War.

Accordingly, Gettysburg is full of ghosts, if the local tourism industry is to be believed. On that visit, and the ones to come later, I devoured every story about them I could find. (If this newsletter’s regular return to the idea of death wasn’t enough of a clue, let me tell you: I have been anxious and macabre since childhood.) I read about Jennie Wade, the only civilian death of the battle, struck by a bullet through the door of her sister’s house.¹ I read every Ghosts of Gettysburg anthology in existence, learning every haunted inch of Little Round Top and Devil’s Den and other grisly sites. There were the middle-grade novels, too, like Ghost Cadet and Window of Time. I spent a lot of time thinking about all the people who had lived during (but mostly not through) that terrible time, is what I’m saying.

In this book a twelve year-old soldier smashes his pocketwatch on a rock to mark his own time of death, which is pretty metal. I remember this book kicking ass but I did later figure out it was very, uhh, Lost Cause-y.

As you might imagine—or you might know, if you’ve got kids of your own—there were some nighttime regrets about my zealous daytime interest. That curtain between the natural and the supernatural gets a little thinner as day turns into darkness, particularly if you’re an impressionable kid who already has a hard time sleeping. So it was that I found myself laying in a hotel bed on one of those Gettysburg nights, drifting between consciousness and the other side, hallucinating a dream room where ghosts and shadows whispered and a faint glow made everything half-visible despite the late hour.

This was the only instance of my childhood when it fascinated more than horrified me, not being able to sleep. Or maybe I was asleep for some of it, doing what I now know is called lucid dreaming, the day’s impressions so vivid that they did not dissipate when I drifted off. Of course the alternative is that the stories about that place are true. Memory has a way of playing tricks and I’m not sure which version I’d rather believe.

It’s funny to know that there are people out there who aren’t just spooked by ghosts, but comforted by them. Recently I came across a story about Ji-Man Choi, who plays baseball for the Tampa Bay Rays. Choi isn’t just a believer in ghosts—he has gone from scared to amused to…something else entirely:

“I've seen ghosts plenty of times,” Choi said through his interpreter, Jae Park.

The first time, Choi said, was shortly after back surgery in 2011. He felt a spirit on his chest that awoke him, and then he felt the bed slump. Another time, Choi claims to have been laying on his side when he felt a spirit crawling up behind him, then felt a hug and heard some murmuring in his ear.

“I was scared at first,” Choi said, “so I didn't want to open my eyes. I dealt with that a lot more times after that.”

…Choi always has a hard time sleeping in hotel beds. When he's comfortable, “It means there's a ghost,” he said.

I love these vast distances between human experiences. It’s delightful to know that there is someone out there making millions playing baseball who also happens to think that ghosts come hug him and help him sleep better when he’s in hotels. And who’s to say he’s wrong?

Nearly ten years ago I read Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses for the first time. I put the following line into my quote book, which has stuck with me ever since:

Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.

On those grounds, I have never ceased to wonder: how many of us will leave ghosts behind?

There are so many cruel and pointless ways to die. So much business left unfinished thanks to the stupidity and cravenness of our world, our culture. If we weren’t made numb by its frequency we might all drown in a flood of tears, because how could we ever stop crying? Yesterday I saw a baby bird dead on the sidewalk that was so pink and new and helpless I didn’t recognize it at first. Yesterday I read another news story about how the demons who run this planet for their own pleasure and profit are pushing us ever closer to complete ecological collapse, boiling India and Pakistan in a heat wave so dire that birds were dying in mid air. Yesterday I watched a video of a Black man talking about how his 86-year-old mother was gunned down by a teenaged Nazi at a Buffalo grocery store on her way to pick up lunch after visiting her husband of 68 years in the nursing home, which she did every single day.

Who doesn’t have unfinished business in a world like this one?

At this distance, nothing about the violence is fascinating, like the historical violence was to me as a kid. Of course it was probably not fascinating to them 160 years ago either.² All of history was once the present and trying to remember that can help us collapse time, and learn something from their pain instead of fetishizing it. Jennie Wade was baking bread when the bullet went through her chest.

It’s like the Iron & Wine song goes:

In our days we will live
Like our ghosts will live
Pitching glass at the cornfield crows
And folding clothes

Like stubborn boys across the road
We'll keep everything
Grandma's gun, and the black bear claw
That took her dog

If there are ghosts out there, it’s days like these I think I might understand them a little better.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next week.

-Chuck

PS - If you liked what you read here, why not subscribe and get this newsletter delivered to your inbox each week? It’s free and always will be, although there is a voluntary paid subscription option if you’d like to support Tabs Open that way.

PPS - If you’re in the Seattle area, I’ll be reading and speaking as part of an event celebrating the launch of Crossing Paths: A Pacific Crest Trailside Reader on May 31 at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park. Tickets are free but the organizers are asking attendees to register in advance, which you can do at the link below.

1. The bullet hole in the door is something of an attraction on its own. Since Wade and her probable fiancé, a Union soldier, died within days of each other without knowing it, legend has it that young women who put their ring finger into the hole will soon find themselves engaged to their true love.

2. And my god, what a miserable failure, that we’re still fighting the same fight they were dying for at Gettysburg.