The Difference Between a Ghost Story and a Grief Story

For most of the history of this coast, when somebody died, you did not leave the body alone.

You kept it at home, in the front room — the good room, the one nobody used for anything, saved all year for an occasion that turned out to be this one. You covered the mirrors. You stopped the clock at the hour of the death. You opened a window so whatever was leaving could leave, and you were careful not to stand between the dead and the open window, because that was the one thing you must not do. And then, because the night was long and the body was there and there was nothing else to be done, people sat up with it. They drank tea. They ate whatever the neighbours had brought. And they told stories.

Here is the thing I keep coming back to, the thing that started me on all of this: the stories they told, in that room, over that body, were very often ghost stories.

The ghost story was born at the wake. It came into the world in the one room where grief was most physically present — where the dead were not an idea but a weight on a bed, a face going the wrong colour, a person you had eaten breakfast with becoming, hour by hour, a thing. People told ghost stories over the corpse the way you sing in a dark house. Not because they believed the house was full of ghosts. Because it was full of one, and the telling was how you stood it.

So the two things were never really separate, and I want to spend a little time on the difference, because I think it is the most important distinction in everything I write about.

A ghost story is a machine for making death survivable.

It has a shape. Something comes back. It comes back for a reason — unfinished business, a wrong to be righted, a warning to be delivered — and because it has a reason, it has a plot, and because it has a plot, it has an ending. You can lay the bones to rest. You can burn the letters. You can say the name, or refuse to say it, or find the child that was walled up behind the chimney, and when you have done the thing the story requires, the haunting stops. That is the secret comfort of the ghost story, the one nobody says out loud: it promises that death is addressable. That the dead can be reached, negotiated with, and — this is the part we don’t admit we want — finished with. A ghost is a dead person you still get to have a relationship with. A ghost is a dead person who is not, entirely, gone.

A grief story has none of that.

In a grief story nothing comes back. There is no shape, because absence has no shape; there is no plot, because nothing happens, that is the whole horror of it, nothing happens and keeps not happening, every morning, in the specific chair. There is no ending, because grief does not resolve, it just eventually learns to sit down. The person is gone, completely, and the world does not rearrange itself into a story about their return. It rearranges itself, quietly, around the hole they left, and you spend the rest of your life learning the new furniture in the dark.

A ghost story says: they are still here, in a way. A grief story says: they are not, in any way, and you will now find out what that means, for as long as you live.

Which is why the ghost story is the merciful one. Given the choice, of course we tell that one. Of course, over the body, in the long grey hour before the undertaker’s van, we reach for the version where the dead can knock on a wall.

We still do the old things, most of us, even having stopped believing the old reasons.

I have watched people who would tell you flatly that they are not superstitious go quiet and cover a mirror in a house where someone has just died. I have watched a clock get stopped by a man who could not have told you why, only that it felt worse to leave it running. The customs outlived the theology that made them. Nobody thinks, anymore, that a soul will be caught in the looking-glass or slip out with the faeries — and we cover the mirror anyway, because grief needs something to do with the hands, and the covering is a small, doable thing in a day when nothing else is doable. This is the part the skeptics get wrong when they call it foolishness. It was never really about the soul in the mirror. It was about giving the survivors a rite, a set of motions, a way to be useful in the presence of the one thing they cannot fix.

There is a custom, still practised in a few places, of telling the bees. When the keeper of a house dies, someone goes out to the hives, knocks gently, and murmurs the news — the master is dead — and drapes the hive in a piece of black cloth, because if you do not tell the bees, the bees will leave, or the bees will die. When Queen Elizabeth died, her beekeeper went and told the bees. A man in a garden, in the twenty-first century, saying to insects, softly, the mistress is dead, but don’t you go.

That is not a ghost story. Nothing supernatural is being claimed. It is a grief story with a very old set of manners — a way of saying the unbearable thing out loud to something that will not answer, which is, when you get down to it, most of what mourning is.

Sometimes the grief is too big to be told as a ghost story at all, and then you can watch a whole community reach for the only thing larger, which is architecture.

When nearly two thousand people are killed in a single morning — as they were in this region, once, in a harbour, by two ships and a great deal of fire — there is no haunting that can hold it. No single ghost is equal to that many dead. You cannot tell a story about all of them coming back; the number breaks the form. So the grief goes somewhere else. It goes into a stone tower on a hill, and a service held every year on the anniversary, and a Christmas tree sent, every year for more than half a century now, to the city that sent help. The dead who are too many for a ghost story become, instead, a memorial, a ritual, a tree — grief poured into things that will stand after everyone who felt it is themselves gone. That is what a community does when it cannot make a haunting big enough: it makes a monument, and it keeps the appointment, forever, out loud.

I love ghost stories. I have spent my life in them, and I will spend the rest of it there. But I have come to think of them as the kindest lie we tell — the one that lets the dead knock on a wall so we don’t have to face the wall being just a wall.

The grief story is the true one, and it is the one we can’t bear to tell straight, so we cover the mirror and stop the clock and go out to the hives and tell the bees, and we sit up all night with the body, and somewhere around three in the morning, when the tea has gone cold and the worst of it is settling in for good, somebody clears their throat and says: did I ever tell you about the time—

And we are grateful. We are so grateful. Let them come back, in the story, for a little while. It is the only place they can.