Commentary

Look at any old person—and some young ones as well—squint with your imagination beyond the flesh, and what you see is a mansion haunted by ghosts, some of them twisted and ugly spirits, others who are beautiful and good. These are the dead who live on in that man, and perhaps in his children and grandchildren.

All of us who are alive contain these apparitions. Some we experience as vividly as our face in this morning’s mirror, others much more dimly, remembering a glance, a word, a snatch of laughter. Some gladden our hearts, others bring tears of grief at their absence long after they have gone to the grave, and still others make us proud that we had the privilege of calling them friend.

Then there are those specters whose words and actions cut us as if they’d just sharpened those knives that very day rather than 50 years ago. Their jibes and insults, deliberately or carelessly delivered, remain embedded, arrows in the flesh; their betrayals rankle long after the consequences are inconsequential.

Naturally, we who are old usually accommodate the largest number of these guests without bodies. From septuagenarians—I am one of these—and up, the simple mathematics of a long life add more and more deceased souls to the time-spun tally. Grandparents, parents, wives, husbands, friends, teachers, and mentors march together, memorialized not so much by a stone and a grass-covered plot of earth than by memory and affection.

These shades haunt not only our own lives, but those closest to us as well, particularly our offspring. In the faces of several of my grandchildren, for instance, is the face of my wife, their never-to-be-known grandmother, dead now these 22 years, who shows herself as well in their kindness and love, and that of their parents, who were her children and mine.

In a novel to be released in late April, “Elegy in Blue,” which I’ve had the great privilege to read, Mark Helprin’s 82-year-old unnamed protagonist and narrator describes his own ghosts throughout the book, paying in particular achingly beautiful tributes to his deceased wife, Clare.

Here, this same narrator points out another attribute of these spirits who frequent our lives. “My allegiance is to ghosts,” he declares. This allegiance is another phenomenon built from the passage of time, this loyalty and love for the dead. As the advancing years add to the ranks of the deceased, we who are old see them in our mind’s eye, and we listen and converse with them just as we do with those around us.

Which brings us all to a question: What kind of ghost will we be? Will those who live on after we have breathed our last honor our memories, tell others our stories, look past the grave for inspiration on their own journey through life?

Some future ghosts have already attained that winner’s platform in the minds and souls of others—men and women and children already certain to be remembered for their virtue, their charity, their winsome ways. They are the good and the beautiful who still live and breathe, and they will be rightly remembered with love.

For those of us burdened with more dubious reputations, and worse, for those who are certain they will be cursed rather than blessed by memory, we must realize it’s never too late to change our ways and our thinking, and make amends.

Consider old Ebenezer Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol,” the bullying miser who in a single night of visitations from three Christmas spirits and from his own ghosts was utterly transformed: “He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.”

Think of Chuck Colson, President Richard Nixon’s hatchet man, who experienced a conversion before serving seven months in prison and who emerged as a man on fire whose work brought hope to thousands of other prisoners and their families.

Think of George Wallace, forgotten by most Americans today, who, while campaigning in 1972 as a Democratic presidential nominee, was shot and paralyzed from the waist down. He, too, experienced a conversion, repudiated his racism, apologized in person to numerous black leaders he’d offended, and in 1982 won 90 percent of the  black vote to once again become governor of Alabama.

Whatever your status in life right now, renowned or unknown, rich or poor, whoever you are, and like it or not, as long as you breathe, you are creating the ghost you will someday become, the spirit lingering in the minds and hearts of others long after you’ve gone to your rest.

So choose wisely your ways and words. Love and inspire others today, and you may be doing the same a century from now. Your name may be long forgotten by then, but the piece of you that lives on in others will be both blessed and a blessing.