Dear Samantha Rose,
In the time between 2024’s winter and spring, I found myself alone on a Cornish beach. Sifting through the sand for sea glass I could take back to my apartment a couple hours away in Exeter, a cocker spaniel-looking dog named Bella wiggled her way in between my crouched legs for a pet, her coat filled with sand from an evening along the Falmouth shoreline.
“Bella is special,” her owner told me. “She can see ghosts, you know?”
I questioned who Bella sees with me on the beach — were the ghosts of my four deceased grandparents trailing behind me as I inspected handfuls of sand for worn-down beer bottles? I settled on the spirit of my mother’s mother, Dorothy, her dyed and permed hair in short-cropped ringlets around her face — the way old photos capture her.
It had been years since I last saw a grandparent. My father’s mother passed away before my parents were married. His father and Dorothy both left the world when I was five. Dorothy’s husband, my maternal grandfather, left the world in my early teenage years from cancer. This is to say: I had my fair share of ghosts to choose from that night at Gyllyngvase Beach, but it was Dorothy I chose to follow me.
I wonder if this conjuring of my grandmother is what you experience throughout Giving Up the Ghost: A Daughter’s Memoir — if we create the image and persona of those who are not present because our establishing of their voices allows us to analyze a part of us we are otherwise unwilling to confront (i.e., an unwillingness to move on and heal).
When conjuring the image of your mother along the shore, you write “‘I understand why you return to this spot, It makes perfect sense that you’d continue to return to where I last was, but I’m not here anymore’” (242). Sure, maybe a medium or ghost box could detect the spirit of your mother by your side, but I don’t think that is important here; rather, it’s the decision to conjure your mother’s memory.
You write that you do not record your conversations with the clients you ghostwrite for — that it allows you to capture their essence in a way that doesn’t quite match a word-for-word transcription. I imagine writing this memoir is similar. You do not have to prove to anyone that you stood beside the ghost of your mother. It is, in its own way, a truth.
On the ways we respond to grief you write, “‘I think her death is challenging you to make a different [response]’” (239). While I find the conception that suicide is “the easy way out,” I do think that seeing it leaves us at a crossroads… how might a person mourn without repeating the manner of death a person inflicted on themselves? Is it possible to push through the thick of so much grief?
I’m inclined to believe that living is tough, and I don’t anticipate much pushback on this sentiment. I don’t believe we ever truly “move past” a person’s passing, either. Yet, pushing onward and making sense of the ones we’ve lost seems to be the way we carry on — making it so others aren’t wrapping up our loose ends.
Thank you for sharing Giving Up the Ghost with the world.
Very sincerely,
Carlin Steere
