Ghosts I Grew Up With
What a childhood sleepover game taught me about the things and people we're not allowed to talk about
Hi folks. This week I wanted to share something about my personal story. I’m often asked how I became a thanatologist, or what led me to pursue it, and there are a lot of reasons and factors. An important thread started in childhood and as I’ve gotten older, had some clinical training, and more context, I’ve spent more time with it. This is a section from a bigger piece of work; I just wanted to share something a little different in tone and texture.
If you had or have half- or step-siblings I’d love to hear about it.
In third grade, around Halloween, I came home with my family portrait. This was the first time I learned it wasn’t OK to talk about some of my sisters. Each member of the family was sketched out in colorful crayon—Dad, Mom, my little sister, my two older sisters, three dogs, one cat, and one bird. And me. That was my world. My Mom saw the drawing and said, “oh, they don’t live with us honey.”
One thing that made me different from my classmates, aside from having lots of pets and variation in the number of siblings I had, was that I was never scared of ghosts. This was because I knew what it was like to have two ghosts in your family.
I want to first tell you about my experience with Bloody Mary, because it will help explain my experience with ghosts.
Journey back with me to a magical place called Deer Park, Ohio and to a happy time called the 1990s. There were no cell phones yet, and my house was the first one in the neighborhood to have a computer at home. I would get up early to turn on the computer and relished the ritual of leaning back in the desk chair, savoring the bliss that came from thinking that this was what it must surely be like in the office where my Dad worked. I loved hearing the series of pings, whirs, and clicks as the machine booted up. I played Wolfenstein, and learned to call up the Command Prompt or Terminal screen, and figured out how to cheat at video games, which I still do to this day, as it brings me joy.
One summer, the family that lived caddy corner behind us, got a Super Nintendo system, and had recently refinished their basement. The basement was finished, like with light-peach painted walls and carpet and no cobwebs. It was cool in the summertime, and we could yell and play as loud as we wanted and not bother anyone upstairs. The family had 4 daughters and were known in the neighborhood for having the largest selection of the good cereal. They had Trix and Fruity Pebbles and Captain Crunch and for god sakes they also had Lucky Charms. It was unbelievable. It was the 90s.
Our houses were divided by two chain link fences which were easy to hop. Childhood for us meant lots of summer days climbing those fences, bouncing between our houses, and walking the two-block radius we were allowed to freely roam. Slamming doors were our summertime exclamation points, and piles of old bikes in driveways, plastic freezer pop sleeves rolled up and stuck into whiskey-barrel planters, and cigarette butts piling up beneath our back deck were commas, offering pauses throughout those long summer days.
One sleepover brought with it a sign of growing up, and that was the presentation of the most important introductory ritual into ones impending pre-teen years: Bloody Mary. We didn’t know who Bloody Mary was, or why she was bloody, we just knew the bravest among us with something to prove had to summon her. And she had to be summoned that night.
I was ready to experience glory, so I volunteered to go first. JJ, the oldest of the 4 daughters and my best friend, was also the one who knew. She knew of things that teenagers did, and she was kind enough to share this insider knowledge with us. She was 11 months older than I, after all.
“Go in the bathroom. Close the door. Turn off the lights. Look in the mirror and say Bloody Mary three times.”
So, I did. The living room was hot with 8 or 10 of us, and the energy was erratic thanks to the Fun Dips we had been consuming, alongside Coca-Cola poured directly from 2-liter bottles into our mouths all night. As children, we looked unwell. Likely at the tail end of an 18-hour middle-of-summer day, we were grimy, laced with dried sweat, dehydrated, and on the verge of colliding at the intersection of over-tired and cranky. Things were ready to boil over.
I entered the bathroom. It was cooler than the living room. The door closed behind me, and muffled screeching bounced off the door. My ears were hot and were ringing.
I was short for my age and pulled out the step stool next to the sink, so I could reach the mirror. The bathroom was dark, lit by one of those comforting nightlights plugged into an outlet, down in the corner near the floor.
Peering at my shadow in the mirror, I said the incantation:
Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Ma-“
Now come back to present day with me, because this is one of the clearest memories I have more than 30 years later. I remember screams, I remember a flash of white, I remember seeing eyes, and I remember cutting my lip. I remember the feeling of the porcelain sink as my face made contact with it. I had seen Bloody Mary, and she had knocked me over. I have no idea how it happened.
This was how I chipped my front teeth, and this is why to this day, one of my front teeth is always shorter than the other, because it’s not a real tooth, and it gets worn down.
Most importantly, this was when I learned to fear not only my Dad, but also my friend’s Dad. I remember the sound of him thundering towards the bathroom having heard the commotion, then seeing a room filled with dirty neighborhood kids scattered among his four daughters—all of us screaming and jumping around like crickets stuffed inside a cup—and looking at me, trying to assess what in the actual fuck had happened. And there I was, looking up at him, wet streaks down my cheeks, with new daggers for my front teeth, red-faced, and crying.
It was Bloody Mary Dad!!! Bloody Mary came to her!!!
But we knew, we all knew. We had stayed up far past our bedtime, and we were now in Trouble™.
So, after this night, I learned that I had seen a monster and lived to tell the tale. My friends all referred to Bloody Mary as a ghost, but that was not what ghosts were to me.
Ghosts were people that were still alive, but that you had to hide. Ghosts were things you lived with, and around, but weren’t allowed to talk about.
Ghosts were my two half-sisters. Not Bloody Mary. Bloody Mary was allowed to be real and even talked about openly. But not the ghosts of my sisters, who sometimes only showed up in my family portraits I drew at school. At least the version I drew for myself and never took home to my parents.
My two half-sisters would appear and disappear throughout my entire life. As a child, I had no idea why two of my three sisters were ghostly like this. It was very confusing for me, because the neighbor family had 4 daughters, who all lived together all the time, but me and my family? There were 4 daughters, but two of them were only around sometimes.
One chilly spring Sunday, I remember shivering on the front porch, which was painted concrete. I remember laying out there for hours. I had been told my sisters might be coming by that day.
I got in trouble by afternoon and told to come inside. They weren’t coming after all.
Why? I asked my Mom and Dad.
There was never a clear answer. Because it was no doubt painful for my parents too.
My two half-sisters were from my Dad’s previous marriage, and they were 11 and 9 years older than I. They lived in Michigan, about 6 hours away by car. And the relationship between the adults wasn’t great, to say the least.
As a kid, I didn’t understand.
And the adults had no real guidelines for how to handle something like this—no idea what to say, or how to say it. So very little was said at all. The only evidence was my two ghost-sisters, who sometimes appeared in our family portraits.
I have a special care for folks with half and step siblings. Did you have any come in and out of your life? We don’t talk about it too much. Maybe because of the complexity that often (but not always) accompanies us, the challenge of relationships between minors and adults who are responsible for them, the limitation of time and custody schedules, and perhaps because we carry an ideal of ‘family is forever’ but it’s often…not.
All for now this week. Take care of yourselves.
Cole