Ghost from my past haunts me, but leaves me without answers

By David McElroy · March 21, 2021

She never really goes away, but she’s also never really there. Like a ghost from another life — a life which I once lived with her — she haunts my dreams and intrudes on my waking hours.

It’s not convenient to live with a ghost from the past. My conscious mind has buried her over and over again. But just when I start thinking I’ve won the long struggle to put her behind me, I remember she’s still in this world. And it all comes flooding back.

Her face. Her eyes. Her voice. Her words. Her habits and her thoughts. Her goodness and her fatal flaws. And then I can’t stop the tidal wave of emotions. It exhausts me, because I’m left with nothing but unanswered questions.

As I walked down an aisle of a grocery store late Saturday night, I suddenly heard something in my heart ask, “Do you still miss me? I still miss you.”

And I felt her presence. She was there. But she was there as a shimmering ghost from the past, not as a real woman who could love me or answer my questions.

“Where are you right now? What are you doing tonight?”

My ghost is always there to remind me that she exists, but never to answer questions. I don’t know whether she’s happy. I don’t know whether she’s forgotten me. I don’t know if she’s sleeping or if she’s still awake at 3 a.m. as I wonder about her.

I don’t want to ask these questions. I don’t want to wonder. It would be far more convenient if the ghost stayed away. But I can’t help myself.

“Why didn’t you choose me? Why did you simply fade away with no explanation?”

I shouldn’t need to have these questions answered, but they torture me. Every time I’ve convinced myself that it doesn’t matter anymore — that it can’t matter since she obviously moved on — I eventually have one of those moments when I realize I’m mistaken. I haven’t put it in the past. I do still care. I do still hurt.

“Was something about me not good enough for you? I would have done anything for you.”

Men often go to absurd lengths to be acceptable to the women they love. (I’m sure women have their version of this, too, but I know this side of the table.) They’ll become wealthy or successful to please the women they love. They’ll build whatever she wants. They’ll change their entire lives just because that’s what it takes to make her happy.

And they will be happy to make the sacrifices — if her love is freely given in return. I would have done anything for her, and I’ll never know why it wasn’t enough.

“Did you really love me? Or were you just fooling yourself with a fantasy to soothe your unhappiness about other things? I don’t even know anymore.”

I’ve lived with the fear of being abandoned — especially by a woman who I love — ever since my mother left in early childhood. I’ve talked about this before.

Did I choose someone who I unconsciously knew would abandon me, in some psychologically twisted need to live out the same old script again? I don’t know. I guess it could be.

“What do you look like this moment? What’s the look in your eyes like these days? Are you sharing your burdens and fears with anyone? Or have you gone back to hiding everything inside? And do you still love me at all?”

The questions are endless. And my heart aches.

There are more of the questions when the ghost comes at night. It’s almost as though she’s sitting right here beside me. I can almost touch her.

I can see her face. I see her eyes and her hair. Her hands. Her lips. But I can see right through this illusion. And just when I think she’s about to look back at me — just when I think she’s going to speak or reach out to me — the ghostly image smiles the warm smile that I know so well. Then it fades away.

And once again, I’m left with nothing but an empty room. And a hurting heart. And a lot of unanswered questions that haunt me when I least expect them to appear.

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Six years ago this evening, a scared young dog came to live with me. She was so terrified on the ride to my house that she pooped in the back seat of the car. She had originally lived her life on a chain as a puppy. Then she lived among far too many other animals in a cramped apartment, where she was pushed around by bigger dogs. I was told she would always be a “special needs dog” and would probably never be much more than the scared girl she was then. But with a lot of love and patience, a very different dog emerged in the coming months. Now that she’s been with me for six years, it’s hard to imagine her any way other than she is today — as the World’s Happiest Dog®. One day, she’s going to tell her own story on her own podcast. You’ll subscribe when she gets started, won’t you? This loving girl deserves it.

It was obvious to me in the late 1990s that western society is heading toward social and economic collapse. When I told other people back then, most thought I was crazy, because they saw their society as stable and booming. But more and more people have slowly been coming to the same conclusion. And now, even the wealthy and powerful seem concerned. A new report from the World Economic Forum says the erosion of “social cohesion” is what we should fear right now. (Full report here.) Although I disagree with a lot of political spin that these elites put on the dangers ahead, I feel certain that we are headed toward social collapse. And most people will not prepare for it. The book that started me down the road of thinking about this came out in 1993. I thought its reasoning was impeccable, but that the time frame would be longer than the book expected. I still find that book a useful foundation for thinking about the issue — “The Great Reckoning,” by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg — even though its predictions are out of date. Dark days are coming. Smart people are going to have a plan to get out of the way of what’s coming. Will you?

Since I posted my audio discussion a couple of nights ago about some recent realizations I’ve had about myself, several people have asked for more about what I quoted from Jordan Peterson. The Canadian psychologist is controversial to some — and I don’t always agree with him — but I’ve found his lectures about art and its relation to psychological archetypes very useful. You can find him here talking about art being more about process than just result, which contains the material I quoted. Here’s another video from a lecture in which he discusses how artists mediate for the rest of society between the known and the unknown. And here’s another portion of a lecture at an art exhibition in which he talks about the necessity of artists for society. And if you missed my audio from two nights ago, here’s a link to my discussion about some things I’ve learned about myself and some things I need to change about myself as a result.

I just realized it was four years ago today when I came uncomfortably close to dying. I don’t remember how blunt I was publicly about this at the time, but the surgeon who operated on me made it clear afterward that I had been much worse than he had thought. My gallbladder was inflamed and I had been in tremendous pain, but what the doctors didn’t know until they started is that the organ was close to rupturing. Surgery that was supposed to take half an hour took two or three hours, because my gallbladder was so diseased — the surgeon’s word — was falling apart as he tried to remove it. I had gone to the emergency room at St. Vincent’s Hospital (the same one where I was born) and was kept for emergency surgery the next morning. I should have been home that night, but I had to stay in the hospital three days instead. The weird thing is that I never really believed I could have died. Maybe it was just denial, but I didn’t feel as though it was my time. I thought I still had a lot of life left to live. Four years later, I’m grateful to be alive, but I feel as though my life is still on pause. It’s been a blur. I still feel as though I’m waiting for “the rest of my life” to start.

Is “The Nightmare Before Christmas” really a Christmas movie or a Halloween movie? It’s both, making it a delightful mashup of themes and images from two very different holidays. Although Danny Elfman’s score was nominated for several different awards, Elfman wasn’t a typical composer for film scores. Up until he started working on films with Tim Burton, Elfman had been a rock-and-roll artist best known as the leader of the new wave band Oingo Boingo in the 1980s. Just this week, I heard an interview on the podcast Song Exploder on which Elfman explains how he came to write the music for the movie, including why he approached the music for the film very differently than he had approached writing rock music. I enjoyed the 20-minute interview and if you happen to love the film, this Christmas would be the perfect time to learn more about how the score came to be. Tap or click below to listen. Listen here.

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