It’s not about the ghost. It’s about the haunting.

Inside the space they left behind

CW: stillbirth, death, loss

A few weeks ago, I wrote and directed my first short film for the Seattle 48hour film festival, a noir film about a mother who is haunted by the space her stillborn baby left behind. The film is based on this moment between me and my oldest child when, about a year ago, he walked into my room and handed me a picture he drew of a young Japanese girl. I told him it was so good, that he is really talented, that she was so pretty. He told me, This is your other baby, the one who died.

What? I said.

He told me his dad told him and his siblings about it the last time they were at his house.

What did he tell you? I asked.

The baby died before he met you. That her daddy was Japanese, that she would be in high school now if she lived.

Why did he tell you?

It was like a bedtime story, my son said. Do you think she would have looked like that? He asked.

I sat with the picture, just staring. I don’t know what I said. When my son left the room, I folded the picture neatly into an envelope. I hid the envelope from myself. I willed myself to forget where it was hidden.

For years after my first baby was stillborn, I imagined her growing up, but not in the sweet scenes like you’d imagine in the movies, no light filled rooms and imagined breakfasts or beach vacations. I imagined her as an outline, a space cut out of the scene, a blank space or a space filled with all kinds of things. The first time it happened, I stood in a hilly park in Miyazaki, Japan. My baby’s father, Tatsu, sat on the grass beside me. We’d planned this trip to Japan so she’d be about three months old when we arrived. It would’ve been my first time meeting Tatsu’s parents and his first time returning home in almost ten years. When we booked the tickets, we were in a state of mutual relief. I was still pregnant, and the baby had just become viable. I was totally relaxed. I knew she’d be ok, even if she was born early. Tatsu had just received his green card, and he wasn’t afraid to leave the country for the first time. We talked about how solid everything felt, like our lives were made of one material, and that material was finally soft.

After we booked the tickets, I walked my dog to piedmont park in Atlanta. It was late summer, and everything smelled like flowers. On the way back, my friend called me to tell me she was in labor, and I spent the rest of the day standing around my friend’s body with two women I barely knew, taking turns holding her hands, her legs, pressing on her back, until she delivered her daughter. After, one of the women and I walked to our cars together. She rubbed her bicep. Making a new human a lot of work, she said, and we laughed and talked about all the massages we deserved for our day of labor. When I visited my friend and her baby the next week, I stared at the little alien creature, touched the skin of her wrist, thinking, this is the fabric of a made thing. I wondered what it took to create a new life, what magic, and how fragile the body and the magic and the life really were. I realized we are always like this, everything and everyone is always like this. So fragile. So temporary, yet convinced we will last forever.

Two days later, my baby stopped kicking.

In Japan, we stayed in a smaller town. It was March, and the weather was perfect. Every morning, we walked to a vending machine outside of an elementary school yard and bought cans of hot green tea. I took pictures of bare gardens and crows. We bought sashimi from the grocery store and ate it at the hilly park. After we ate, I stood up. A family walked behind us, mom and dad following a toddler. The toddler kept falling down, crying, laughing. Then there she was, the space. In real life, my baby would have been a few months old, maybe fifteen pounds, unable to do much but lay around in someone else’s arms and soak in the world. But the space she left behind was at least eight years old and growing fast. She had long hair. She touched the grass with her fingertips. Her body cut a shape out of the landscape, and that space was filled with another landscape, like a portal, a cliff and a dark beach. I blinked. The weird illusion was gone. I sat down and told Tatsu about it. So a hallucination? He said.

No. I didn’t see it. I just kind of knew it, I said.

So you made it up, he said.

Well not on purpose.

I thought you didn’t believe in God and ghosts, he said.

I don’t want to think of a baby as a ghost. Can a baby be a ghost? I asked.

This is sad, he said.

A baby cannot also be a ghost, I said.

And yet, I’ve had these weird spectacles of her for 18 years. After that trip to Japan, I started seeing the space my dad left behind too .

Recently, I read The Grieving Brain by Mary-Frances O’Connor. She writes about the maps we make of our world and the people in it. She describes the way people are cut out of these maps when they die or otherwise leave us. She describes stories people tell about seeing their loved one walking down the street right after they die. O’Connor describes this as our brain filling in the gaps. When I read it, I felt so jealous of the people in the stories, of their efficient brains. Why did those people get to see real life versions of their lost people? Why did my brain only give me an an outline, a blank space, a portal to a weird landscape?

I talked to a friend who also read the book. She said, Of course you don’t see real life versions of your kid or your dad. You were there when they all died, and it was intense and kind of gross and a total heartbreak.

She was right. Those final grips and groans and torn up bodies and pale skin were the last images of my kid and my dad. That’s what the most haunting ghost stories are made of - the details we don’t want to see or remember, the surprise of a body transformed, unknowable, still.

Tatsu was also right. It is sad. The kind of sad that feels like a wilderness, like something that is alive around you, like something that follows you and never sleeps.

It’s also stunning, the way our brains hold onto the maps of the people we love, the way our brains resist fully remaking the world without them in it.

We haunt ourselves to keep the people we love beside us. We haunt ourselves to help them stay.

The little movie I made last month is about the moment we face the ways we haunt ourselves and the spaces we’ve created, the spaces they left behind.

Take it as a prompt, an exploration, an excavation. What does this moment look like for you? It doesn’t have to be about a person who has passed. It can be any loss, any haunting - a house or a job or a friend or a relationship.

Write the moment you finally faced your own haunting.