Chapter 9 #2
He paused. She was way too calm, and now he knew exactly why that was. He stayed silent, hoping she would open up a bit.
Devon sighed. “After my birth mother died, I saw a ghost, so I assumed it was her. The shrinks told me that I made it up as a way to cope with my loss.”
“Ah,” he muttered.
“What does that mean?” she asked, with a bite to her tone.
“The shrinks don’t really believe in any of this woo-woo stuff, and they don’t really have the tools to handle it.”
She tilted her head at that as if considering his words. “No, they probably don’t. I’m not sure that I even gave them the right information at the time. It’s just that, when my mother died, … they convinced me how I made it all up.”
“And what if you didn’t make it up?” he asked her.
“I didn’t,” she snapped and then groaned. “That doesn’t mean it really was my mother. But … I never saw her again. So, I thought she stopped in to say goodbye. Yet that sounds foolish too.”
“Not at all,” he replied. “We do see that a fair bit, especially if they didn’t get a chance to say goodbye here.”
She was quiet for a long moment. “I wasn’t there when she passed,” she shared.
“She was in a car accident and died at the scene. She’d gone to get groceries and never came home.
That’s all I knew until I was older. I mean, they told me at the time that she was gone, but I didn’t have any understanding of what that meant.
… Then, when Tabitha died, it was like losing my mom all over again. ”
“Of course,” he agreed. “Nothing is easy about losing somebody you love.”
“And my family consisted of just the two of us, Mom and me,” she explained.
“So, for me, everything in my whole world changed. I kept insisting that she wasn’t dead because I’d seen her.
And, of course, the shrinks had lots of things to say about that, but none of it was helpful,” she stated, with half a laugh.
“In a way, I held that memory very close. I cherished the thought that I had seen her. At the time, I was hoping she was coming to take me away.”
“Did you ask her to do that?”
“I was a child, so I don’t remember exactly how the conversation went. Yet I do remember asking something similar. I think it was more along the lines of Is it time to leave?”
“And did you get an answer?”
“Yeah, I did,” she confirmed. “I got a no, and a not yet.”
There was silence for a long moment. He pondered that and added, “It sounds to me as if you really did see her. And that she was basically there to say goodbye and that she loved you.”
“There was a message to that effect, yes, but I was still quite upset that she wasn’t there to take me away with her,” she noted. “So, I don’t know that I gave the right response.”
“There is no right response to that,” he said, “and you were a child. Your mother would have known that.”
“Would she?” Devon asked. “I’ve held that close for a long time, wondering if I had done something differently—or had said something differently—maybe she would have stayed?”
“Ah, don’t you love that grief always assigns the blame to ourselves?”
“All I know is I felt guilty for a very long time,” she shared.
“But you’re an adult now,” he pointed out, “and you understand that, when she died, she probably needed to see you one more time.”
“Possibly.”
Devon didn’t really sound as if she was ready to let it go. Camden continued. “Anyway, if you didn’t see anything familiar about this ghost, for want of a better description, then it probably isn’t Tabitha. If you did, then it would be something to explore a little further.”
“I don’t think so,” she stated. “I didn’t get that same warm, fuzzy feeling I had with my mother’s ghost.”
“That is important too.”
“But maybe it’s because Tabitha wasn’t my blood. Maybe she came to see the twins,” Devon suggested. “I still don’t know how to explain it to them. I don’t know what I would say to have them understand.”
“You might be surprised,” Camden noted. “Kids seem to have a very different acceptance level. Adults are forever asking questions. They want to know why something’s happened and how, but kids are just like, Can I have more?”
“Yeah, that was me. I wanted more, … more of my mother. Yet she never came back again, so that wasn’t something I got.”
“You never saw her again?”
“No, I didn’t,” she said. “But, when I was losing Tabitha, my mother was on my mind a lot. And, if you told me that I brought these ghouls into existence because I focused so much on Tabitha’s passing, then I might have understood.”
“That’s understandable too.” There was so much more to all of this in Camden’s point of view, but he had to proceed one step at a time with Devon. “Sitting in the hospital waiting for somebody to die reminds you about all the people you’ve already lost.”
Devon added, “But I don’t want to have brought Tabitha back for this. That would be incredibly upsetting.”
“Oh, I don’t think you brought her back,” he stated. “That doesn’t change the fact that it could be her coming to see the kids and being confused because she’s not seeing them. And, of course, you’re not in the same location, so that could also be causing her some strife.”
“Wow, that’s a lot to think about.”
“Most of the time, they’re tied to a location, like where they passed.”
“So, wouldn’t that be the hospital?” she asked.
“Yes, in some cases, but not in all,” he clarified, with a laugh, “because we do see a lot of people who somehow manage to get from the hospital, or wherever they died, to the place where they were loved. Now don’t get me wrong.
We don’t really know very much about this.
I mean, it’s not as if anybody comes back and says, Hey, by the way, this is what happens to us. ”
She burst out laughing, making him grin.
“At least you’re laughing about it.”
“I am. Even now, if I see it again, I’ll be wondering.”
“And, if you see it again, you can always ask if it’s her. If you get any response, you can help her go to the light. Help her to see that everything is fine and that she can go, that she can rest.”
“Christ,” she muttered, then quickly hung up on him.