Of Ghosts And Fathers

On March 13th, 2007, Christa and I were sitting down at a Mexican restaurant in Lakeview known more for its margaritas than for its food. We were expecting a friend, and had just ordered our first drinks, when I received a call from my father's phone. Normally, I never answer the cell phone while sitting at table, but my father had never called me on a weeknight in recent memory, so I picked up.

It was my step-mother, Joyce. My father had died in his sleep of sudden heart failure, brought on by arteriosclerosis, or a hardening of the arteries. He was in bed in their Virginia home when it happened. He was 52 years old.

Joyce had been married to my father for over 20 years, so you can imagine her incosolability over the phone. Our conversation was brief, and I was grateful for the quick notice.

As a stony glaze overtook my expression, I managed enough cognition to ask Christa to cancel our margarita orders, and to say "yes" when she asked if she should buy us take-out for dinner.

I have heretofore been unwilling to analyze my emotions immediately following that phone call, but have recently had occasion to ponder them: I felt cold--beyond the harsh Chicago early spring temperatures--and empty, of course. And I wondered, "is this real?" And I wondered, "what is?"

Okay, enough of the sadness. I gave you this background so that I could have a jumping-off point from which to paraphrase my speech at the funeral: My father was, first and foremost, a thinker, a workbench philosopher (builder by trade) who was so successful at inundating his only child with a skeptic's worldview, that the child found himself questioning the father's very existence only moments after being informed of his death.

If you find this chilling, know that you are not alone. I guess it's kind of cliched to be scared by your own thoughts, but there I was, feeling pretty heartless, even with the knowledge that my involuntary emotional response was conforming to my father's best wishes for me.

Of course, the one thing I did not bring up at the funeral-- indeed, now that I think about it, I may never have felt this way while he was alive-- was a very major difference in philosophy between my father and I. Namely, that he was a spiritualist, (if an agnostic one), whereas I am a secular humanist-- otherwise known as an Atheist.

Now, linguistic prescriptivists and descriptivists (shout out to Dr. Soy) can argue about the definition of "Atheist" all day (e.g. "Is it someone who simply doesn't believe in the existence of God [prescriptive], or must they believe unequivocally that there is no spirit, and thus no afterlife [descriptive]?"), but what I generally take as truth is this: that the idea of "first cause" is silly and scientifically useless, and that the existence of any kind of God or gods or afterlife seems ridiculous against the extremely detailed empirical relief of evolutionary science.

Hey, but what about ghosts? Well, exactly. What about them? There are, as you all know, a frightening amount of ghost stories floating around the collective unconscious. They have been transmitted verbally or in print since the dawn of human culture, and have even in (historically) recent years, made their way into the visual world via video and photographic "evidence", which "evidence" I really just see as part of the over-arching cultural narrative re: ghosts, which narrative goes something like this: "Whatever you believe about God and Religion, we can all agree on one thing, which is that life goes on after 'death', and that therefore, there are ghosts among us."

Now. A die-hard skeptic rejects this narrative out of hand as being based on an amalgam of anecdotal evidence, human gullibility, and mass hypnosis. This is the point where my father reaches out from beyond the grave, so to speak, and prohibits me from ever being a 100%, true-blue skeptic. Aside from a fervent belief in ghosts, channeling, and reincarnation, and aside from his unmatched ability to convince others of anything he chose to argue about, there was the following story. Said story was told to me by my mother and grandmother (yes, together) when I was 14, and later confirmed, in great detail, by my father, who, once again, it is nigh on impossible for me to disbelieve, especially when it concerns truth and posterity. It deals with ghosts, fear, and extra-physical bonds, and unless I am someday told that the whole thing was a big, deliberate farce, I will always believe that it is a true story. You see, it's like this:

Pocono Mountains, Pennsylvania, fall of 1976. Little Danny is only a few months old, and already his exhausted parents need a break from his exuberance. Ed Boucher enlists the help of Joe, his youngest brother, to babysit his infant nephew while Ed and his new-ish wife (married just over 1 year) Lisa go out on a date. If you have never been in the Poconos at night, let me tell you: it's right out of a horror movie. The branches of big trees creak and grumble, whistling winds blow sudden bursts of dead leaves against windows, wooden houses moan and pop as they settle, things feel ominous (I love it up there). Sitting there, trying to watch T.V. to distract himself from the eeriness as I slept, my young uncle Joe may have even pondered the mystery surrounding my namesake, a man named Daniel Whitaker.

From my understanding (this may need correcting), Daniel Whitaker was a well-liked individual-- a joker, and a bit of a tough guy. He had gone to college with one of my father's 13 siblings, and was counted as the best friend of my father and at least two of his brothers. At some point in his life, he joined the Merchant Marines, ostensibly to seek out the kind of adventure that was sought out by tough guys in those days. When his conscription was finished, he rented an apartment in Iowa, in a house owned by a young newlywed couple. Months later, he was found murdered in a cornfield, having received a shotgun wound to the back.

The young couple disappeared, never to be heard from again.

You see? My parents named me after this person. As a non-skeptic would say, that's some serious mojo.

Anywho, fast forward to 1976, it's weird and dark outside, and my uncle Joey is holding down my parents' meager fort as I sleep upstairs in the "onesies" pajamas common to the era (a jammies jumpsuit with feet, and with a single zipper up the middle). He hears a window open upstairs, accompanied by the sound of a person descending the staircase. His aural impression is so acute that he is paralyzed with fear, and cannot even bring himself to check on the snoozing youngster in his charge. He is still frozen, standing, listening--when my parents arrive home from their date.

"Joey, what's going on," says one of them, seeing the terror on his face. As Joey attempts to explain what exactly has him so unsettled, my father waves his experience off as over-dramatic, knowing his brother to be a pretty wound-up guy. My parents head up the staircase to check on me, and my father is heard to utter the famous last words: "It's probably just the house settling".

It is at this point that there is none, absolutely zero variation between this story whether told by my mother or father.

Upon entering my bedroom, they find the window to be inexplicably open in the cold mountain fall, and their son to be wide awake, though not in distress. As they approach, they notice a bulge that is insistently pushing my jumpsuit jammies out of form. The window is closed by one parent while the other opens my pajamas to find--

A sweatshirt belonging to Daniel Whitaker.

How do they know it's his? Simple. Danny Whitaker was in a fraternity in college, and like all fraternities, they had sweatshirts with their chapter's Greek letters emblazoned across the front. Here's the difference: while almost all of the frat shirts were blue, with red lettering (or something), the sweatshirt stuffed into my pajamas was RED with BLUE lettering-- the "reverse" style, only printed and worn by 3 of the frat brothers-- Danny Whitaker, and two of his closest friends.

Completely freaked out beyond belief, my father takes the sweatshirt and folds it for use as that night's pillow. While sleeping, he has a dream that a picture he's been searching for (one that includes himself and Whitaker) can be found sandwiched in his high school yearbook. When my father awakes the next morning, the sweater has gone missing (yes, from just underneath his head), and when he opens his yearbook-- yep, you guessed it, out plops that photograph.

Now, that story may indeed get some tweaking on this blog as the weeks go on, but the gist will stay the same. My parents truly believe that some supernatural force (whether it be Whitaker's ghost or something else entirely) left a message (what message? says who?) for them, and for me. That there is a connection to my namesake, and that this connection involves Whitaker's untimely death seems undeniable, and I will always believe that my parents had this experience.

Does this make me a non-atheist? I mean, I can espouse the principles of secular humanism all day--to wit: that the best thing you can do for humanity is to practice the golden rule, and that gods, worship, and tradition only get in the way. The thing is, no matter how convincing these arguments become--indeed, I would even go so far as to call myself a convert to them--I will never escape the nagging sense that there is something more, something else that awaits us beyond the veil. The scariest moments in my life now are the times when I doubt there is really anything at all.

I certainly don't believe in any form of God or original purpose or bloody "first cause", but there are days when I become very convinced that there is nothing for us once this consciousness ceases to be, that due to subatomic determinism, there may not even be free will. These are dark days for me, but I am inevitably pulled out of the malaise by a little ghost story once told to me by my parents, a story indelibly reinforced by my father and my respect for his intellectual integrity. He reaches out from beyond the grave and tells me not to take life so seriously; that what is unexplainable is not necessarily impossible, and that one should hope for the unexpected, rather than take measures to prevent against it. He teaches me to always take a closer look, even if done through a hazy lens, and thus to enjoy the wonder of existence rather than to waste time worrying about what comes after. Live now and let go later, as it were.

Thanks, Dad. I'm trying.


Extra: My mother corrects my mistakes.