by Sukey Forbes
Late in her career, Kübler-Ross began to examine cases of people from all over the world who had been declared clinically dead, then returned to life. Based on their accounts—and supposedly she had looked into twenty thousand of these—she had become convinced that the soul leaving the body was not the end, but merely a transition to another phase of existence, one that offered a much broader perspective. She expressed this very matter-of-factly, as a respected mainstream scientist. But then, of course, her more conventionally minded colleagues heard this and decided that maybe she was not one of them after all.
Kübler-Ross had talked to patients who had come back to life in hospital rooms and were then able to describe exactly what everyone had said and done during the time they were considered “dead.” In her reports, blind people who had near-death experiences sometimes came back able to describe in detail the clothing worn by those who’d been standing over their supposedly lifeless bodies. Accident victims who had “died” on impact could, after they’d been revived, relate all the details of how they were extracted from the wreckage of a crashed car. Some near-death survivors could even recall the exact license plate number of the vehicle that had run them over.
A lot of professionals who had respected Kübler-Ross’s early work thought she had gone around the bend with this stuff, but her response was to say that science simply needs to remain humble in the face of mysteries we have yet to unravel. She made the spirit world sound like one of those high-pitched whistles that dogs can hear and humans can’t. Just because you don’t have the right instrument to pick up the sound doesn’t mean the sound isn’t there. Since that time there have been numerous books published by credible scientists and others that give more weight to Kübler-Ross’s theories about near-death experiences. One book in particular, Proof of Heaven, detailed the experience of a neurosurgeon as he lay in a lifeless coma for a week. It laid out in full scientific detail how this near-death experience could not be explained by any brain functioning.
I loved Kübler-Ross and Eben Alexander’s descriptions of the afterlife, but particularly the fact that they weren’t just repeating assumptions based on some religious traditions. They were making a case based on alleged firsthand experiences, supposedly observed with clinical detachment. But what resonated the most for me was the way they both described the people waiting for us on the other side. They said we were met by the people who had loved us most. It was like the image of the boat being received on the other shore from the poem at Charlotte’s funeral. Her soul group. Awaiting her arrival.
• • •
In November we went to Naushon to return to the Aisle of Beeches, where we’d installed a plaque in Charlotte’s memory on the large stone that I’d hugged, crying. On that trip I took some of my new spiritual library with me. I had been calmed and comforted by what I’d been reading, but when I stood in among the memorials in that dappled sunlight and confronted the reality of Charlotte’s name and dates, I came unglued all the same. I stayed there crouched and leaning into the stone, weeping once again until I fell asleep.
If death is so blissful for the dying, I kept asking myself, why does it have to be so devastating for those of us left behind? I thought again about the Pietà, and all the mothers through all of human history bringing flowers to the graves of their children. Was grief, agony, and loss all we could expect in this world? That’s where the consolation of religion is supposed to come in. But what if that consolation isn’t enough? Where do we draw the line between reasonable faith and nutty magical thinking? That’s when it occurred to me that on Naushon we never drew the line. On Naushon the boundary between the natural and the supernatural had always been negotiable. The spirit world was never discussed—we were WASPs, after all—but it was always assumed.
Maybe for the first time I began to think seriously about all the island’s ghost stories. I thought about Kübler-Ross’s image of the dog whistle and the way that science had pushed belief in spirits to the margins. Or had the hubbub of technology simply diminished our ability to perceive, the way television and the Internet supposedly diminish our attention spans? Had the “unnatural” world of hustle and bustle and concrete, steel, and climate control in our homes simply drowned out a natural ability to perceive the world of spirit? Have we literally insulated ourselves from it? By spending more time listening, could we regain that ability? With enough focus, could we begin to reconnect? Was that the “religion teaching” bequeathed by my family that would actually do me some good?
The ghost is a standard feature of most old New England houses, where floors creak and windows rattle and doors bang in the breeze even without the help of spirits. Sometimes the stories seem to be passed along as part of a playful mythology, like Santa Claus or the tooth fairy. But on Naushon, and within my family generally, the stories were much more matter-of-fact. Not that everyone, if forced to articulate their belief system, would have insisted that the ghosts were real. I’m sure there were skeptics, but the question simply never came up. No one was ever asked to take a position. So to us, as kids, having ghosts seemed about as remarkable as having a refrigerator.
My great-great-uncle Don, the one who died of a ruptured appendix in Stone House, has been encountered dozens of times in the halls, sometimes running with a football. Emerson’s daughter, my great-great-grandmother Edith, often appears at dinner, as does John Murray Forbes’s daughter Sarah.
Julia, the wife of a cousin, had once been a frequent visitor to the island, and she’d become pals with another, older cousin named Lawrie. She’d been away for a while, and on her first summer back, she came up to the house describing how she’d just run into Lawrie at the first bridge and had a lovely chat with him. What she didn’t know was that Lawrie had died the previous year.
Several years earlier, Julia had calmly inquired of her dinner guests if they could see the old ship captain pacing back and forth in front of the fireplace while they were dining. Ever the gracious hostess, she had sat and quietly watched him for twenty minutes before even mentioning it.
• • •
On the island we have a jack-of-all-trades, Laurence Sevigny, a New Hampshireman who comes down every spring, stays at Mansion House, and does whatever repairs need to be done. He’s been doing this at least since I was a kid. A couple of years ago, I ran into him and he seemed slightly shaken. I asked him why.
“I had two pretty darn weird experiences this week,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“I have been alone all week and no one is on the island with kids, but one night this week I heard children running and laughing in the halls while I was trying to sleep. A bit later somebody climbed into bed with me in the middle of the night. They didn’t push me or anything. Nothing mean. But it really flipped me out.”
I could relate. On Naushon once, when Charlotte was very small, I went downstairs to get a bottle for her in the night and I had an eerie sense that someone was following me. It was real enough for the hair on the back of my neck to stand up. I felt as if someone were in my space, but I couldn’t see or hear anything. I wanted to move away, but I couldn’t, because this presence stayed with me.
“The next day,” Laurence went on, “I was in the basement and I heard footsteps on the first floor. I called, ‘Hello!’ and I heard somebody call back, ‘Hello,’ so I called again and heard the ‘Hello’ response again, and then again, along with footsteps. The steps and the sound of the voice were moving toward the kitchen, so I went right up. But nobody was there. And Moose [his dog] was right there with me, and she started to bark and act real strange. Her eyes were going back and forth like she was watching something that I couldn’t see.”
The next spring when I saw Laurence again, I asked him where Moose was.
“I can’t bring her anymore,” he said. “She gets too bothered by the ghosts.”
The tales of the supernatural were not limited to people. In the mid-180
0s John Murray Forbes had a much beloved pony on the island for the younger children to ride. For thirty-one years she was on Naushon, and one day she vanished. She was last seen grazing quietly by a gate near the farm. She disappeared with a family terrier as well, but the terrier returned home ten days later none the worse for wear. Her mysterious disappearance has never been explained. John Murray Forbes wrote at the time that she “disappeared into the Elysian fields where all good ponies go.”
When we moved into Mansion House, I was actually afraid to sleep there alone because of the ghost of Mr. Bowdoin. Meanwhile, we were pouring a fortune into restoring the place, so my discomfort was pretty inconvenient. One night I stood by myself upstairs in the hall in the main part of the 1809 structure and I said out loud, “Excuse me, Mr. Bowdoin, I’m scared of you and I don’t want to see you. I know you’re here, and I’m not saying you have to leave. But we love this house just as you do and I really don’t want you to scare us. You can stay, but please leave us alone. And whatever you do, please do not scare the children!”
I have felt a comfortable kinship with Mr. Bowdoin ever since. I still greet him by name every time I arrive, and say good-bye to him every time I leave.
The Forbes association with ghosts extended to the mainland as well. One summer we hired a house sitter for our place in Milton while we were on Naushon. Her name was Lizzy, and when we returned to Milton she told my father that she kept passing some kind of presence on the stairs. She went on to describe being in the kitchen, and then for some reason felt compelled to go into the living room. She went and stood in the doorway, where she saw an older man with white hair and a white beard, sitting serenely with a Forbes tartan across his lap but with an expression on his face that said, “This is my space; don’t come in.”
“Uncle Alex,” my father told her. “Don’s brother. The one who built this house.”
All this may sound nutty, but it inspired me because I so desperately needed something more than a door slamming shut. Game over. The end. I needed a new perspective that would unite my ordinary experience with the new state of being that Charlotte had entered. I needed a single container that could include both the natural and the supernatural, and yet was more substantive than Emerson’s gauzy romanticism.
I didn’t know it, but that’s what Stephanie had been waiting to offer me, as soon as I was ready.
• • •
We spent our first Thanksgiving without Charlotte with Anne and Harry at their home in Maryland. I sent out a card that was a photograph of our family—all five of us—standing on Baker Beach in San Francisco, waving good-bye to the Golden Gate Bridge. On the inside I wrote, “We are thankful for the support of family and friends during difficult times and we are thankful that we moved to Boston . . .” It was very important for me to try to set the tone for people in how to respond to us. I wanted it to show some strength, some self-reliance.
When December came I was forced to tamp down the pain even more and deal with the usual hubbub of Christmas shopping and children’s holiday events. The only holiday decor that brought me any festive cheer was the lights. The elves aroused in me an irritation so great I wanted to kick them. It was an odd, dark, macabre expression of my Kübler-Ross anger phase. Perhaps not so curiously, the ladies in my grief group all felt the same way and shared several laughs about the thought of the bereaved crazy ladies kicking elves and shouting, “Merry F-ing Christmas!”
Feeling the need for more life around us, my family and I also decided to get a dog, which would be delivered after the first of the year. In California we’d had a beloved Jack Russell terrier named Waldo who’d been hit by a car the year before, when we were in Boston looking at real estate. Michael wept when we got the news about the accident. I didn’t. When we told the children, they sat there in silence for about five seconds, and then Charlotte cocked her head to the side and said, “Um, can we get a hamster?”
Snow came early that year, and by the middle of the month the Boston area was covered by a blanket of white. I thought of Dubliners, and how Joyce had described the snow “falling faintly through the universe . . . upon all the living and the dead.” I had always loved snow, and this year I found the silent insulation especially comforting.
But December 23 was Charlotte’s birthday, not an easy day for stoicism. She would have been seven.
We went to visit my mother in Concord and the drive past great-great-great-grandfather Emerson’s shuttered home in Concord made the day seem dreary. We spent the afternoon sharing stories, trying to keep the conversation light. It reminded me of the Saturdays after chores when Mum would have formal tea with cheap grape jelly and cream cheese on Ritz or saltine crackers. But the tea itself was always an exotic (and very expensive) variety of Lapsang souchong named after Houqua (Hu Kwa), John Murray Forbes’s benefactor in the China trade. It has a smoky flavor from being dried over pine fires. This one gourmet indulgence would be followed by a dinner of baked beans and hot dogs, iceberg lettuce with Ken’s Italian dressing (one of the four meals in Mum’s repertoire).
My mother and I also slipped away to buy stocking stuffers at the Concord Five and Dime, another family tradition steeped in Yankee frugality. During my childhood, Santa didn’t bring big presents; he just filled stockings. And according to the tags we’d sometimes find on our shiny new pencils and toothbrushes, he often shopped at Osco’s Drug and the five-and-dime.
Walking along the streets of Emerson and Thoreau’s old town, I asked my mother to tell me what she thought about God and the afterlife, and her views seemed much more like mine than I’d ever realized. She, too, said she felt much closer to God in nature—even in gardening—than in any church, but that she appreciated ritual and, like me, found meaning and comfort in communion, and in singing and reciting scriptural passages in unison. Then she reminded me of how, in the early seventies, she and my father, along with several other families, branched off from the Unitarian Church in Milton and began to gather in a small chapel that had been donated to the parish by my mother’s grandmother. For a while, they “rolled their own” small religious service, which was focused on ethical behavior but was as likely to draw from Aesop’s fables as the Bible.
My mother and I had never been close when I was a girl, but we had become good friends as I progressed into adulthood, and this image of her own period of searching helped to draw us even closer. In the seventies, after she and my father divorced, she’d continued her efforts at reinventing herself emotionally and spiritually, first by switching to the Episcopalian Church and then by attending “personal growth” workshops. But the God of her imagination was such a male force, she told me, that she never took to the “Goddess movement” that was so in vogue, despite dabbling in it for a while during that decade.
But my mother had come a long way spiritually, and I was learning from her daily. Before we left her house that bleak December day she said, “You may take this as an insult, but I think this process is going to make you better people. You are going to come through this process more humble.” I asked her what she meant. “Well, you’ve been handed an awful lot. You’ve got a lot of gifts. I think this is a humbling process and at the very end of it you’ll be in a better place.” I think she was right, but at that moment it was a difficult message to receive, and slim consolation. Frankly, I had the same urge to kick her as I did those pesky holiday elves that tormented me all around town.
When we came home that evening, Cabot and Beatrice insisted on having a cake and candles and singing “Happy Birthday” for their sister, but I simply couldn’t. The tears came streaming and my throat closed up. I smiled and pretended to sing but I was just mouthing the words.
After I put the kids to bed, I had to get out of the house, so I drove down to see the big oak tree through which I’d watched the sun go down the day Charlotte had died. The neighbors had installed a huge, illuminated pink star there as a memorial to her. For a few moments I sat
crying silently. Then I began banging my fists on the steering wheel screaming, “Where are you?!” It was not my finest moment.
Two days later, when Christmas came, we let the kids open the gifts in their stockings, then went directly to the airport. We had lined up a totally absurd trip to Bogotá, Colombia, where Michael’s sister Jeanne lived. We needed to get away, and we needed to blot out this particularly “Kodak moment” holiday, which we managed to do by spending nine hours in an airplane. Flying for the first few times as a family after Charlotte’s death, I would daydream that perhaps the plane would go down and we all would die and be reunited with Charlotte. If we were all together, I found this thought perversely comforting, but on the few occasions that I flew alone I developed great anxiety about the plane going down with me on it. How could I do that to my children and husband? We were in so much pain already. I could not die and leave them. I had to stay alive and healthy for them.
Jeanne’s husband did some kind of work for the U.S. government, which meant that we had access to an armored car with bulletproof glass and a heavily armed driver to be our escort into the countryside. To add to the absurdity, our three-year-old, Beatrice, exposed to Spanish by way of our Peruvian nanny, Maria, was the one we called on when we needed an interpreter.
Leaving the city limits, we started to see tanks and other military equipment, which brought to the surface the thought that had been lingering ever since the plan originated: “Maybe we’ll die down there.” We hiked up to a mountaintop overlook with a panoramic view of a lush green valley with gorgeous lakes, the kids rode donkeys, and we had a picnic. The whole experience was completely surreal, and then a few days later we flew home. Afterward, my friend Sarah described the whole excursion as temporary insanity in the form of a death wish, again fueled by guilt.