I don’t believe in ghosts, but I love them anyway. Doesn’t make sense, I suppose, yet it’s true. Humans believe a lot of things that make no sense, and I’m no different.

In any event, it’s Mother’s Day as I type this, so here is my Mother’s Day post.

My mother, my sensible, brilliant, talented mother, believed in ghosts. She lived in a haunted house with a terrible man. She saw floating lights one night while the terrible man was away in the hospital (for drinking too much and punching walls). She spent the night with this terrible man and a few others in a cemetery. They captured floating lights on infrared film. I saw the pictures at the time, but when they broke up, the terrible man kept the film. Of course.

I believed my mom, but I still didn’t believe in ghosts.

About 22 years after my mom died, I communicated with the terrible man. Per my mother’s wishes, I had avoided him. She’d been concerned for my safety and had made me promise to never speak to him again. I kept the promise for 22 years, but then, feeling fairly safe in my adult life, I reached out to him. Call it morbid curiosity. And it’s not as if I had ever called him terrible to his face.

He told me how even though he was now married (his third wife, I think), he knew that when he died, he’d be with my mother again. He knew this because she was his true love and because he spoke regularly to a psychic medium, and in this way, he spoke often to my mother on the other side of the veil.

Apparently, the ghost of my mother never mentioned me.

In any event, he offered to pay this medium to talk to me and to help me connect with my mother again. I said yes. Was it wrong of me to let the terrible man pay for me to talk to a psychic medium? Maybe. I think it was wrong of him to punch holes in walls and point a gun at my mother’s head.

And again, I’m curious. What on this earth would the medium say?

So, I spoke to the medium. I sat in my car for an hour and listened to her tell me about my mother’s spirit, her ghost, her existence on the other side. I didn’t tell her how terrible I thought the terrible man was. He paid her, after all. And I assumed anything I said would get back to him. He was in another state and much older, but still…He was paying for this conversation and he still on some level scared me. And I was breaking my promise to never speak to him again.

And I can’t say I ever understood the part of my mother who fell in love. She fell in love with my dad, and she fell in love with this monster. She fell out of love with them too, but I still never understood it. My brilliant, sensible mother…how did she have this side to her?

Maybe we can never know our parents completely.

Recently, finally, this terrible man died. Charming to the last, many people expressed their sadness for his loss. I don’t blame them. He could be funny and smart and, as I said, charming. I loved him when my mom first introduced me to him. I wanted them to marry. What a wonderful step-dad he’d be, I thought! Thankfully, they never married.

They didn’t need to marry, he said. They were soul mates. They’d be together forever in the afterlife. But, gosh, he always was a liar.

Today is Mother’s Day. I don’t believe in ghosts.

Except for the ghosts of the past. They hang about forever.