Ghost Sledding

He brought me out into the hall (I could have sworn it was haunted) and told me something that I didn't know that I wanted to hear: that there was nothing that I could do to save you; the choir's gonna sing, and this thing is going to kill you.
- the Antlers, "Two"

I want a book that acknowledges that life goes on but death goes on, too, that a person who is dead is a long, long story.
- Elizabeth McCracken, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination

It's not just the holidays that make me obsess (is that the word for this lingering, always-present if mostly dull longing?) over my mother's absence, but all this family time does invariably strike a chord with long-ago Christmases. These holidays are wholly different from anything I've ever known: the creation of magic is different from being cast in its spell. It's hard to get caught up in the former without feeling just a little bit of the latter, though. So when I see old pictures that so clearly reflect that same wonder I saw in the faces of last Friday morning, I am momentarily transported back to a snowy lane when everything seemed possible and safe. A wintertime landscape guarded by a grandfather in a woolen coat.

These days, my children believe all of what I tell them, unless I do it in my most sing-song, teasing kind of a voice. I have to choose my words carefully when they ask about our dog, one year dead, and the mythical Grandma Chloe, who overlapped with them in only the most passing fashion. Long enough to gaze at a fetal silhouette and correctly predict he would look like me; too briefly to graze her lips across even one round, peach-fuzzed head.

After imparting to them the simplest and most honest answers I can, they inevitably come to their own conclusions. It pains me not to correct them when they sigh and say that Grandma Chloe, like Ruby, is not ever coming back. But I try to balance it out by talking about her as much as I can bear it, so that her story will go on. The pictures tell it best, and today they talked about the time I went sledding with Grandma Chloe as if it happened last week. It's not the same as coming back, not by a longshot. But small people talked excitedly about her this morning; she was a subject, associated with action.

Four years gone and she still goes sledding.