A Real Life Ghost Story

I'm writing this because I don't know what to make of the events that have recently happened. Well, I do, and I don't, that's my conundrum with spirituality. I can beileve it, but I can also see how it could all be explained away.

The thing is, I'm willing to admit that I want to believe.

That statement feels a little like coming out of the closet. I'm bisexual by the way, something I've been pretty open about most of my life but has felt irrelevant until recently. Another coming out of the closet, but somehow, admiting that I might believe in ghosts feels way more vulnerable and scary to me.

I have been a very stubborn atheist for most of my life.

I still refuse to believe in any one God, don't get me wrong, but since the pandemic and the events surround the release of my first memoir, the global shut down, and my divorce, my mind has been very slowly opening to the possibilities that I'm very wrong about what might exist in the universe.

On that note, I have a story to tell you, and I very much want to hear your thoughts on what I've experienced this past week. So if you read this, please leave me a comment. I want to talk about this. This feels really big to me, in a way I can't fully describe.

The Substack Article

I've recently gone back to substack. It's a very female driven platform, and I like that. There's quite a bit I don't like about substack, but the community of women, writers, and very specifically memoir writers, is actually pretty incredible.

I found an article from a woman and immediately she talks about grief in a completely different way. She frames it differently, in a way that doesn't leave you flattened. She talks about the part of grief we miss sometimes, or most of the time, the part that actually might bring joy because we loved the people we lost.

In the article she talks about her dad, and how he leaves the light on in her office for her. Sometimes randomly, sometimes after his favorite sports team wins a game. She's certain it's him, because she asked him to do it.

That makes so much sense. It's a lovely story.

You can read her article on Substack here: https://substack.com/inbox/post/198215571

The Conversation

So, because things have been happening lately, things I can't fully explain away, when I got in my car to go home after work that day that I read that article, I did something that made me feel really silly: I started talking to my long dead mother.

It's far from the first time I've talked to her. I write to her. I tell her stories about the kids when I've visited her grave, but this time, I asked her to do me a favor. I asked her to show me she's around "Prove it, Mom!" and I wanted to be very specific about my request. Like the woman who asked her father to leave the light on in her office.

"Mom, I like to write, and I want to write about this when I get home. Will you set out my journal on my desk? It's on the shelf Steven recently hung up in my office. It says 'ocean' in the bottom corner, that's the one I'm using right now. Leave that on my desk."

I said a lot of other things. I asked her to take care of my boy, because she never got to meet my boy, but that was the very last conversation I had with her, telling her I was pregnant. And oh boy does he need a Nana right now. He needs guidance, love, maternal nurturing. I asked her to look after him.

When I got hom I fully believed and hoped that my journal would be on my desk.

It was not.

I grabbed it anyway. Sat down, and wrote about an experience I'd had the previous weekend, and then admitted that maybe it's because I don't know the rules.

The woman in the article had had a conversation with her dad right before he died, asking the question of turning the light on. He took that with him into the afterlife.

Had that been my mistake?

Before Mom died, I said more than once (way more than once) "You better haunt me!" and that's pretty vague.

Am I 14 years too late?

I went to bed frustrated, and feeling ridiculous. I didn't tell anyone. I just held it in for myself. A secret hope and wish that my mother was somewhere near me, still being a mom.

That was Wednesday.

The Earthquake

On Thursday, yesterday, I went to bed a little late. I curled up into Steven, as we always do, I don't think either of us can sleep these days if we don't curl up together. I've needed that comfort in my life for way too long, and now I rely on it.

I think we had just fallen asleep, when we woke suddenly to the house rumbling.

I shot out of bed, it was just after 10pm.

He sat up, and said "an earthquake?". I grabbed my phone thinking of my son so far away in a highrise apartment in downtown Portland with his dad, and ran to the hallway to check on my daughter who is home from college.

When I made it to our bedroom door, Steven opened the door to my office and said something like "Oh, shit" and looked down. I ran to see what he was looking at, my heart still pounding in my chest worrying that more earthquake was going to happen and unsure where to go, or what to do, and then I saw it...

One of the shelves that Steven had hung up above my desk in my office, the one containing almost every journal I've ever written in, had completely fallen off the wall. My journals scattered across the floor, and, you guessed it, my desk.

What we had experienced was not an earthquake, it was the rumbling and crashing of all my journals and the very heavy shelf board falling off the wall, hitting my desk, and the french doors that open up into our bedroom.

The Journal

What I saw amongst the pile of journals I had previously organized by date, was one open journal. Only one. Of all the journals that fell, only one was open. I took that as a sign to read what was written on the page.

Let me show you:

This is what I wrote on each page on May 13, 2025, while working on a memoir I'm still on the fence about called "The Silent Mother". These were notes I had written to myself trying to express the grief I was carrying and why all of this fucking matters and why I feel so fucking broken all the time. The side of grief that flattens someone.

Listen:

"... but the hard part was never fighting with mom. The hard part was coming to terms with everything she had put me through and recognizing the permanence of never being allowed to keep fighting and trying.

It was the biggest and meanest joke she could play on me. As if she were taunting me... "What are you doing to do now that I'm gone?"

She had had the last word.

The ultimate silent treatment.

Good one, Mom.

You got me.

I was the loser. Mom was the winner. She found her escape and trapped me in my eternal hell to try to make sense of everything that held no logic.

Ther was no logic in the madness.

Only the madness, and so I went mad.

I wouldn't be able to tell you how to help a grieving person overcom their grief.

Grief is so complicated.

It's so much more complex then feeling sad or missing the person that is gone, forever.

The concept of forever is impossible.

Maybe people who truly believe in heaven and the after life have an easier go of it, because at least then forever doesn't exist.

In that case death is temporary because your person lives on somewhere else.

As if they moved to a different country with no phone connection. But for someone like me who does not believe in heaven or the after life, and good luck trying to convince me, I wish I did, death is permanent, and forever is a terrible and impossible concept.

I truly believe that I'll never see my dead family again, and I have to find a way to live with that.

I have to find a way to be ok.

Especially with how young I was."

Those are the words I wrote almost exactly one year ago.

Attempting to put down words to make sense of everything I went through as a young mom, struggling to be a mom while experiencing deep grief.

I immediately burst into tears, and sat down on the bed to tell Steven what had happened, and why this was bigger than an earthquake.

So much of the world, the majority of the population, believes in something else. God, spirits, their ancestors sticking around the watch over them. They pray, the ask for guidance, clarity, signs. They live with faith. They believe, truly believe, that things like this are, without a single doubt, their dead person trying to communicate with them.

I could easily explain how the shelf fell. I look at how all the screws came out of the wall, and understand what likely created the collapse, but again, this is so much bigger than my shelf of journals falling down.

I think, if it was Mom, I think she knows how stubborn I am, even if I am talking to her in my car, and wondering if she can hear me. I think she knew I needed something more dramatic. See that line I wrote "good luck convincing me"...

Mom knows me.

The timing of when it happened also matters.

Mom used to talk about the importance of numbers.

She was born on the 16th, then gave birth to my older brother on the 17th, and then later me on the 18th days of our birth months.

Mom was born in the 60's. My brother the 70's and me the 80's.

Moms number was 6, my brother's was 7, and mine was 8.

It always lined up. 6, 7, 8.

After Mom died, I always saw her birthday on the clock: 10:16.

It's always 10:16.

A little after 10pm on Thursday night, our little earthquake happened.

Mom?

I can explain the screws. I can explain the shelf. I can explain the timing if I try hard enough. But I can’t explain the feeling I had when I saw that open journal — the one page that held the exact words I’ve been wrestling with for years.

Maybe it was nothing. Maybe it was everything. Maybe it was my mother.

I don’t know. But I want to know what you think. Tell me in the comments — truly. This feels big, and I don’t want to sit with it alone.