When Ghosts Speak - Mary Ann Winkowski [55]
“We decided she should be buried with it,” they told me. “But maybe she wanted one of us to have it? Or for us to share it?”
They described the locket as a gold heart that contained two little pieces of hair that their mother had clipped from their heads when they were babies. Both women were very concerned that they do the right thing with their mother’s most treasured possession.
When I arrived at the funeral home, their mother was laid out in her casket with the locket around her neck. Her ghost was standing over the body, wringing her hands in despair.
“Did you want one of your girls to have the locket?” I asked as I stood beside her.
“I loved my girls and I loved my husband,” the woman’s ghost declared passionately.
I nodded and waited for her to go on.
“But the guilt. I think it was the guilt that made me sick,” she said softly.
I have seen this happen over and over again. Once people are dead, they are willing to share things that they would never have revealed when they were alive. I don’t always know whether they’re simply unburdening themselves or are convinced that others should truly know, so I listen to their whole story before I say anything.
This ghost told me that before she met her husband, she had become pregnant. She had given birth and put the baby up for adoption. The baby’s father, a soldier, had shipped out and never returned. Many years later, she learned that he had died. Several months after giving up her baby, she met the man who became her husband and went on to have two daughters with him. She never told him about her first child.
“The terrible thing was that the baby was adopted by people who lived in our town. I know who she is. Sometimes I would even see her. I thought about contacting her. But I never told anyone. Now I need you to do something for me,” she said.
“Well, I don’t know what good it would do to tell your husband now that you’re dead. And your girls just wanted to know what to do with your locket,” I replied. “Why complicate things?”
“Because they are complicated,” she said. She told me that although her daughters thought that the locket held two pieces of their baby hair, it actually held a piece of the woman’s own hair and a curl from her firstborn. If she let them take the locket, they’d be living with her lies forever. What she wanted, she told me, was to get the locket back to her first daughter. “She needs to know I’m her mother,” she told me. “I don’t know why I know that, but she just needs to know.”
I told her that I would do as she asked—but I’d have to tell her daughters right away so they could take off the locket before the burial. I added that I didn’t see the need to tell her husband, though if the girls wanted to tell him it would be their business. She seemed to be fine with this and thanked me profusely.
Toward the end of the evening, the daughters, who had been grieving and meeting with visiting relatives, sought me out. They asked if their mother had anything she wanted them to know. We stepped into a private room, and I told them what I had found out. As expected, they both stared at me as if I were crazy when I told them the story. I gave them the name of the woman whom their mother wanted the locket sent to.
They really didn’t say much to me at all. Just stared. I don’t blame them. The news was completely unexpected. This was one of those times when I need to remind people that I am just the messenger. Of course I prefer it when I can say, “Yes,