Visitors

My Granny hasn’t been well for the past couple weeks, so I’ve been spending some afternoons sitting with her and chatting. It’s interesting to hear the stories she tells about her childhood and earlier life pre-me. We always assume that our parents and grandparents had no lives before our birth, that their youth was something in the hazy past, unknowable and disconnected from our own reality.

When I hear Gran speak about the past, I am transported to a time that I can’t even really imagine. It helps that she has a bit of a local reputation for being an orator and storyteller. It also helps that she has a family reputation for embellishing her tales a bit to make them more exciting. That aside, the grains of truth are there. I’ve heard the story about the time, when she was a girl, that she and my great-grandfather had to ford the Rabacca Dry River when it was full. The river, which is usually a trickle in the middle of a vast volcanic sand and rock trench, sometimes rises due to heavy rains in the mountains, becoming impassable. For some reason, she and her father had no choice but to cross it one day when it was deep and rushing. They had to swim their horses. This is a phrase I’ve only ever seen in fantasy novels, and only ever heard when Gran tells this story. They had to sit strong on the backs of their horses, and force the reticent, insane animals to swim across the river. Gran, despite her youth, was more than up to the task. She loved horses, and was a keen rider in her day.

Anyway, this post is not really about the plethora of stories than Gran has to tell, but about the one she told me yesterday in particular. She asked me, quite out of the blue, if I’d ever had a ‘visitation’. I had no clue what she was going on about, and wondered if her fever was coming on again, causing her to babble. When I looked blankly at her and professed my ignorance she clarified. She meant visits from the afterlife.

As I told her, I’ve never had any experience with that sort of thing, although I know several people who claim that they have. My mother, for example, tells the story of the little blonde girl who peeped at her in the bathroom one day. Her helper tells of seeing my dead uncle walk across the living room. The house I lived in years ago when I was doing my A’ Levels in Barbados was notoriously haunted by several spooks. I never saw any of them, but I was pretty much scared shitless most nights if I happened to be there alone.

So Gran went on to tell me that she’s been ‘visited’ quite often in the past few days. She can’t identify her visitors, but she knows they’re benevolent and loving. She’s not scared of them. She thinks they’ve come to comfort her. She knows this because this is the second time she’s had visitors from the beyond. She and her second husband (my grandfather was the first) were going through some difficult times financially and decided to rent out their house. While it was rented, they would live in her mother’s old house, which was empty at the time. According to her, they lived in two rooms in the massive old house.

Her husband was away when she fell ill. She was in a sickness-induced sleep one day, immediately after having a bath, when she felt the strangest sensation across her face. She woke and saw several people standing over her. She recognized these people immediately as some of the domestic workers who had lived in her mother’s house, and who had all passed on. They stroked her face and one of them, a man, told her to leave the house that night or she would die. She turned up at my father’s house a couple hours later. This was before my parents were married. She pled her case and told him she had no choice but to stay with him until she could evict the people she’d rented her house to.

The point of all this is that she’s having visitors again. These aren’t one-off visits, but people who seem to be hanging around. Included in this company is the only one she recognizes – her dog, Sammy, who was put down nearly two years ago. She not only sees Sammy, but she feels him brushing up against her. While this would creep the fuck out of me, it brings comfort to my granny, as do the nameless, faceless ‘friends’ who visit. It brings comfort because my granny, who is eighty-five, is feeling the effects of age, and appears to be ready to die. She’s not scared of it; she even seems to welcome it. She says that when we get old, we start feeling obsolete, surplus. She doesn’t deny that she is loved, but she simply feels like she can be of no use to anyone.

I think Gran is simply feeling a bit low because she’s ill and needs a little help. But suppose she’s right. Suppose, in truth, she is having visits from people who she once loved (including Sammy the dog), people who once loved her. And suppose these visitors are there to comfort her in her last few days or weeks or months. What if they’re visiting her because they’re the pre-welcoming committee for the afterlife? This would scare the living shit out of me. In fact, it does. Because if Gran dies anytime soon I’ll know for a fact that her passing was presaged by the presence of other worldly beings. If she doesn’t (which is what I really hope), then I can easily pass it off as an old woman’s comforting, sickness-induced delusions.

I believe her though, much as the cynical skeptic in me hates to.