Hauntings

Los Angeles

By Andrea Scarpino

I’m writing a collection of poems about my father’s death, and about loss more broadly, how the dead haunt us, how we want to be haunted. My friend Jennifer said after reading my collection, The first couple of years, the dead haunt you all the time. After that, you wish you could have their ghosts back. She knows what she’s talking about; her father also died. But I don’t think she means literal hauntings, although I didn’t ask. I think she means that we miss the dead so much at first that everything we used to do with them is tinged with sadness, every smell is meaningful, every anniversary, holiday, every insignificant thing—the dead one’s pencil perhaps—grows in importance and weight. Eventually, loss becomes less distinct, less sharp—it has to if we’re going to survive—and we long sometimes for those early days when we could almost feel our dead standing watch, walking on the journey next to us.

When my father first died, my friend Chris told me to write through it. So I did. I take advice very literally. My father, for example, used to always tell me to run like hell if anything bad happened. He meant if a fire broke out in a restaurant or a gunman walked into the supermarket. But after he died, I started running and I haven’t stopped since. Now I think running like hell cures most everything, including the flu and bouts of anxiety, and maybe writing through it does too.

In any case, I’ve found, lately, that I just want to be done with these poems. I don’t want to order them one more time, move commas around again, think about titles or epigraphs or dedications or even to which contests I might send the collection in the next couple of months. I just want to be done, finito, fin. I wonder if that means the book is done (i.e. I can’t stand it any more so this is how it will end) or if I’m ready to move on, tackle other things. And I wonder if it means I’m done with my father’s ghost for a while, if I need new air to breathe, new projects in which to immerse myself. Sometimes, it’s just too much to think and write about how much I miss him, day after day, hour after hour. Sometimes, sitting at my desk and reading the comments my friends have so carefully given me, after they have so carefully considered my work, just feels like too much. I read gossip sites instead. I do the LA Times crossword puzzle online. Then I do the sudoku puzzle for kicks.

That doesn’t mean, of course, I’m ready to be done with my father forever. Maybe it just means his ghost and I are ready for a break. A little time away to see other people, let other lives pass between our own. Maybe some people would call this healing or acceptance. I just call it letting my father rest awhile. Hoping he’ll be there when I’m ready to pick him up again.

Poet and activist Andrea Scarpino is the west coast Bureau Chief of POTB. You can visit her at www.andreascarpino.com

Author: stevekuusisto

Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University View all posts by stevekuusisto