Maria Mazziotti Gillan Ghost Voices

Maria Mazziotti Gillan

Ghost Voices

Ghost voices trail behind me like silk scarves, all my dead still live inside me even years after they have passed over to that other world. My mother’s voice, sardonic and practical, my mother, who spent a lot of time criticizing everything I did, although she said if she didn’t tell me, who would? My mother, who held me at her round kitchen table, patting my back, saying, Cry, cry. It will do you good, though she told me she had forgotten how to cry.

Myfather‘s voice tellingstories of his youngerdays after he arrived from Italy at 16, stories of how he met my mother, stories of the heroes he’d so admired— JFK and FDR, my political, radical father sitting with me every night after my mother died until he, himself, passed at 92.

My sister, her voice wobbly, calling me at 7 PM, asking when I was going to be at her house, my sister, who was ill and frightened, so much so, she needed me to just sit and hold her fragile hand every night while she talked about her life and all she remembered.

My husband, so athletic and strong, beset by illness that robbed him of everything he cherished— swimming, running, riding his bike, driving a car, even his mind, and his voice, softer and softer, almost a whisper, his voice saying I love you into my ear, his world populated by ghosts who came to visit him in the months before he died, ghosts, who told him they were saving a place for him.

The others that I have lost now wait their turn to speak, but my ancestors’ voices I can only imagine since I never met them, left behind in Italy,