At this point you may be impressed by my situation. It probably sounds fascinating, in an eccentric woman who lives in an antique windmill kind of way.

Wow! How do you do it all? What kind of impact does it have on relationships and family?

The best way to understand how talking to the dead impacts life with the living would be to spend some time in my shoes. Lucky for you, I am wearing UGG Boots today, so you will be incredibly comfortable. Like, “Oh look, we sacrificed a lamb for you!” level luxury. You’re welcome.

Before we dive too deeply, I do want to be clear: I am not Jennifer Love Hewitt (or more precisely the spirit-channeling character she played on TV). I would love to be so whimsically adorkable, surrounded by family and friends who willingly accept my uncanny instinct for spectral communications. In fact, after the thunder and lightning excitement of my origin story died down, I needed some way to learn more about what exactly was up with my new role. So I watched all five seasons (#bringitback) of Ghost Whisperer. While I did find it to be an engaging dramedy, it prepared me to commune with spirits in the same way a Hallmark movie equips owners of quirky coffee/book shops to handle loan officers (Careful, Ms. Snarky Pants, he’s very likely going to be your blind date tonight).

Needless to say, I was left wanting in the instruction department. Luckily, my deceased callers were almost always happy to drop some afterlife lessons. At first, I eagerly took down every word, ensuring pen and paper were always at the ready, should our discussion venture into The More You Know territory. That lasted for about a month, at which point I tossed out all my notes and started to make my own sense of the situation.

So I’ve been on my own when it comes to dealing with my hand. Over the last fifteen years I have not found an appropriate opportunity to open up about my skill with the living. As a result, there have been awkward moments aplenty, limited career options, and insurmountable obstacles to long-term intimate relationships.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. You mean you haven’t even told your family?

Almost…but not really. Join me as I look back on a conversation that happened after I’d returned from my first spirit-requested mission.

I was up in my room, trying to wrap my head around my visit from my first ghost, Edith, when I heard an unnerving rattling at the door. Suddenly, my mom burst into the room. She was holding a screwdriver as though she had been attempting to jimmy the (unlocked) door.

“Explain to me what is happening in here!”

“I just got back from going on an errand with a, uh… friend.”

She scanned the room, arms still raised slightly, as though she was preparing to be jumped by a ninja encased in my clothes hamper. After a minute or so, her eyes must have adjusted to my lamplit room or her Mom-on-a-Mission adrenaline tapped out; her shoulders dropped and she carefully turned to face me. I remained on my bed, wary that any movement would cause her to spring forward and lodge the flathead into my throat.

“Where is it?”

“The box of books that I picked up?”

“We both know we’re not talking about books, Ainslee.”

I was still immersed in my mysterious visit at that moment, so I assumed that my mom was had come in to broach how Edith had appeared to me. Maybe my mom was a rogue ghost hunter!

“Did Edith talk to you? Is she here?” I leapt up from the bed excitedly, heading for the door, hoping for another chance to talk with her.

“Here? No, she, Edith, I guess, called me this afternoon at work. I am not…”

“She called you?” I was befuddled and intrigued by this new piece of information. Apparently she had leveled up in her spirit communication techniques. Obviously she was not a ghost hunter, but in a higher order of spirit guides.“Do you have a special phone for those calls?”

My mom narrowed her eyes, and dropped her head in exasperation.

“I am not here to play games, Ains,” her voice was tense. I noted an undertone of fear as she continued. “I came home to find you, and you were gone.”

“But I was with her! She came to the school…”

“Ainslee, stop lying! I know about the mushrooms! Edith told me everything.”

“But why would she…”

“Kiki was scared and…”

“Kiki?”

“Her daughter, Kiki, your friend! Come on, Ainslee! This is serious.”

“Mrs. Marcus? You mean Mrs. Marcus. Not Edith.” Reality hit like a brick. Of course my mother was not talking to Edith. This was the woman who had sent Arden Daneko away from my birthday sleepover in fourth grade because she brought a Ouija Board into our house.

“Wait… so then who is this…Edith? Is that your dealer?!”

I’m going to internally pivot here to give you a little more insight into my drug experimentation, as I’ve mentioned it a few times and may be painting an inaccurate self portrait. At seventeen, I was just moving out of an incredibly careful childhood towards more of an I’ll try anything once mindset. Whereas riding a stained mattress down the staircase of an abandoned house had once seemed too rife with consequence for my taste,  perhaps all those years of avoiding danger made me susceptible to the beckoning finger of adolescent experimentation. As a late-blooming thrillist, I had very little skill at covering up my tracks or withholding information. I also was a poor judge of my co-conspirators’ tattling tendencies, hence the call from Kiki’s mother to my own.

Now however, circumstances had changed, and I was forced to become a swift weaver of stories.

“Yes. Edith was my dealer. But I sent her away. She was too much trouble. She made me cut school and drive her out to Oakport for a stupid errand. I’m sorry. You must have been so worried.” I sat back down on the bed, dropped my head into my hands and channeled my disappointment in Kiki to produce a few superficial tears.

This display seemed to work for my mom. She alighted next to me delicately, and slid my hair behind my ear so she could catch my eye.

“It’s been a hard week, hasn’t it?”

I nodded weepily, worried that speaking words would break my focus.

“Your father and I still can’t get over how we forgot your birthday. I know that must have a lot to do with what you’re going through.”

(Or absolutely nothing, but whatever.)

“You know, we thought we were so prepared for the teen years. Kertis really was so easy. I guess that experience made us naive.”

(BTW, it was in fact my brother Kertis who had hooked us up with the mushrooms in question. “Ains, you have to try ‘shrooms for your birthday. It changes e v e r y t h i n g.” Thanks, bro.)

“Maybe we should move you back into the house for right now. Having your garage room and car might be a confusing amount of freedom. Let’s try that for the next month, and we’ll see how it goes from there.”

I nodded softly, curling into her shoulder. I knew then that I couldn’t trust Kiki, my brothers, or my parents with my secret. That night, as I moved my clothes and books back into the house, I laid the foundation for barriers that would allow for my double life. While these walls would be absolutely necessary to protect my expanded interaction with the great beyond, they inevitably limited my connection with others.

Until recently, that is. But we can discuss that another time.

I don’t know Haley Joel Osment, and I probably never will. I am willing to bet, though, that he hears “I see dead people” several times a week. I definitely know that this was the first ice-crawling-up-my-spine-to-my-brain thought I had when I realized that I was seeing a dead person.  I’m making my first time seem instantaneously revelatory, when it was more like a scene from the Abbott and Costello playbook. Let’s stop for a moment and back up the ghost train.

The momentous event took place in my high school library where I was working on a compare/contrast writing assignment about sleep disorders. I didn’t know this then, but libraries are mega-popular spots to catch up with restless spirits. Think about it, how many times have you witnessed people talking to themselves at a library? That’s what I did that day, when the woman dressed as a 1950s phone operator asked me to retrieve her Senior yearbook from her son’s attic before her grandkids could deduce from the inscriptions that she had been a giant stoner in high school. I assumed that I was interacting with a confused person who had somehow wandered into the school (and the future), which made some sense due to her apparent fixation with youthful regrets.

“Um… I’m sorry. I don’t think we keep the yearbooks in this part of the library. Do you live near here?” Switchboard Sally looked at me as though I had just misused every word I’d ever spoken. Her disappointment thinned out as a realization swept over her features.

“Ah-ha. We haven’t spoken to you before, have we?”

In my experience, when a someone takes a conversation to first-person “We Town” the discussion is about to go off the rails. As fate would have it, the school librarian, Ms. Colabra, passed by the stacks at that moment.

“Everything okay over here?”

“I, uh, think she is looking for the… yearbooks?” I looked to the curious stranger, who shook her head and flashed an inside-joke smile before gazing down at her saddle shoes. Maybe I was not supposed to mention her issue to Ms. Colabra.

“She,” Ms. Colabra pointed gently to me, “needs help finding yearbooks…?” Colabra was looking at me hopefully, kindly. Then it clicked for me. Colabra, not seeing my cat-eye bespectacled companion, thought I was living in first-person “She Town.”

I stepped forward, “Yes…she does.”

“Then let me help you, erhm, her find them!”

As we walked to the section that definitely would not be helping me with my research into narcolepsy, I mentally reviewed the new information.

1. Colabra was truly the best.

2. The woman next to me was not visible, audible, or feel-able to others.

My (imaginary?) ward now took to ensuring that this point was made very clear to me by doing jig-infused jumping jacks around the reading tables filled with unperturbed studiers. I gave myself an internal high five for maintaining composure despite the furious dance of the Mary Jane fairy.

“Here you go. She goes. There are the yearbooks!” Colabra gesticulated awkwardly and quickly scuttled off to the library desk before having to translate additional pronouns.

“I’m sorry. This must be very bizarre for you. Let’s take things step by step. My name is Edith Mavery, and I am a spirit in the material world.”

This was actually not my I see dead people moment. I did realize how well I knew the songs by The Police (WE ARE SPIRITS! in the material world. ARE SPIRITS! EEEEOOOOooooOOooOoooo!), and also wondered whether I had missed important meals or sleep or hydration.

I was about to respond to her, because that’s how normal this whole thing seemed, but she put her finger to her lips and walked toward the library doors.

This is as good a time as any to tell you a bit more about where I was at that point in my life. A few days prior to this happening, I had turned seventeen. This was made particularly memorable for me because my parents had completely forgotten about my birthday, and then went into hyper-attention overdrive, because I’m in the middle of their three kids and also not one of their two natural-born children. So they freaked out worrying that they had made me feel like I was not part of the family, the thing that they always meant to avoid. I honestly was not too offended. I mean it’s not like teenaged me was totally psyched to hang out with my parents for my birthday. My plan was to say I was going to my friend Kiki’s house, and then we would drive her car out to my family’s lake cabin for the weekend to try mushrooms.  However, because of the big birthday mix up, my parents made plans for the entire family to go to the lake cabin for a belated birthday jamboree. So mushroom experimentation had been delayed to the night prior to the encounter with Edith, AKA the hallucinatory result of my shroom-induced permanent brain damage.

Needing to understand the extent to which I had shifted my reality, I followed the apparition out of the library, through the halls, until she abruptly stopped at the atrium doors, watching me expectantly. When I stopped alongside her, she mimed walking through the doors, her gestures growing more exaggerated with each run.

Finally, she stopped and looked directly at me. “Don’t respond to me, you will look ridiculous. I can’t make these doors open. Please walk through them and we can discuss our next steps. Again, I apologize for the surprise you must be feeling. We all have a difficult time with our first contact.”

So we walked through the doors, and continued to walk silently down the street, all the way to my house, where I could finally talk to Edith and get my head straight. We went to my bedroom, an apartment over the garage which I had swooped in on when my older brother Kertis relocated to campus. The room was still in the process of transitioning into my own space. Edith perched on the sweet wingback chair Kiki and I snagged off the street a few weeks back. I had half-heartedly reupholstered it with sheets that I’d tie-dyed my last summer at Girl Scout camp. Leaning back deeply into the chair, she seemed incredibly tangible. The only hint of otherworldliness was that the wrinkly sheet did not flatten beneath her, as if she were a feather alighting on a blade of grass.

“I remember my first contact,” she was chuckling to herself, completely immersed in memory. “It really heightened my senses. Not that I needed more of that then. So who are you, now?”

“Ainslee Dratsch,” I held out my hand, wanting again to see if I really could feel her. She took my hand in both of hers and pulled me in for an embrace. She was definitely solid to me.

“Welcome, Ainslee!” she was warm to the touch as well as in countenance. “You are one of us now!”

“Am I a spirit?” the words spilled out concurrently with the thought, a bolt of terror shooting up my veins.

Edith tittered again, her face expressing a motherly pride.

“No, no. You are now capable of fully seeing and realizing your gift. You are able to commune with spirits. But you are very much alive.”

“So you are a spirit? And you need my help?”

“Yes on both accounts. My, you are lovely. I just am so excited to witness your birth! But we should get back to why I’m here, shouldn’t we? As I said earlier at the library– and I apologize, I had been there for quite a while waiting for a guide, so I probably came across so oddly. I didn’t realize what a strange position that would create for you! I actually crossed over for the first time myself, and it is so funny. Being back, but not really, well…being.”

I was moving further and further from my theory that Edith was a figment of my shroomagination, because all her words did seem to resonate with a deeply-held truth. It felt like I’d heard all this before, in dreams or on the wind. Then again, maybe it was all cooked up by my drug-addled brain.

“I expect that you will be needing something more than my account to fully accept your new role. Well, that works just fine. We can stop by the cemetery on the way to Al’s house.”

“Al?”

“Yes, my son, Aldous. The yearbook I am concerned about is in a box in his attic, so we will need to pay him a visit. You do drive, don’t you?”

I nodded.

“Then let’s get on the road. We will need daylight to see my grave!”

So began my first spirit-guided road trip. My parents had given me my Uncle Billy’s old Impala for my birthday, another bonus from the guilt that kept on giving. I got in, and was about to drive off when I remembered that Edith couldn’t open her door. I put on an act of looking for something on the passenger side to quell any curious neighbors. Once Edith was seated I closed the door, and hesitated. If I was in fact suffering from hallucinations, perhaps I should go take a nap instead of operating a vehicle. My curiosity was too strong, however, so I slid back behind the wheel.

“What fun!” cried Edith, clapping. “Let’s take the long way by the river. Turn left up here, dear, this shall be such a treat. Thank you for trusting me. It probably sounds so silly, this quest of mine. Perhaps I just needing an excuse to come back here, check up on things. I guess I always meant to take care of that yearbook, and it just got away from me.”

I rolled down the window and was fascinated to note that the wind didn’t capture a single wisp of my passenger’s hair.

“I don’t think it would bother Aldous, he was such an open person, even as a child. Just very nonjudgmental, I learned so much from him, even as his mother. His wife Ginny, on the other hand…well, she was always a bit of a drag.”

Edith continued on about her family, and after a while I only heard her directions, and tuned out the story. I couldn’t imagine that I would invent such a talkative apparition. Plus she was taking further along the county highway than I had previously ventured.

“You’re going to need to exit right here, darling. Watch for the gate, it’s set back a bit from the road.”

The sunlight was golden, giving the early Fall afternoon the ethereal feel of a Maxfield Parrish landscape. I half-expected a faun (more Pan than Bambi) to emerge from the surrounding woods. I noted a rusted gate approaching, and glanced at Edith. She was back on discussing the courtship of Al and Ginny, which she still did not understand.

“Yes. That’s the place. This should put your mind at ease.”

We turned down the road and she stretched her arm out the window.

“I do miss the wind. That was the thing I noticed first when I crossed. The stillness of the wind. Well, my stillness despite the wind.” For the first time, she seemed a bit saddened.

“Stop here. We can walk the rest of the way!”

I parked off the road on a patch of grass freshly flattened by a previous visitor. I surprised myself by automatically performing my duty to release Edith from her side of the car. It was already becoming second nature for me to help a spirit out.

She sprung out gaily, recovered from her brief bout of melancholy. She took a step then stopped and scanned the scattered gravestones.

“I believe we want to head this way.”

I followed her lead, and nearly stumbled over her (again, totally solid and real) when she turned suddenly and pointed at our feet. On the ground, tilting upwards as though it was a shammed pillow placed at the top of a made bed, was a marker reading Edith Antonia Mavery, 1940 – 2015.

Then the icy-spine began, and the words emerged. I. See. Dead. People.

I looked at Edith, smiling joyfully with her hands clasped below her chin. I hoped that she would stick around for a while after I fulfilled my mission. It was nice to have a cheerleading ghost.

“It is truly remarkable being on this side of your experience. I am so grateful. But let’s not dally too long here. Any questions before we go?”

My mind was spinning, but one thing did strike me suddenly, stopping the roll. “You don’t look seventy-five.”

“Ah yes. That would be disconcerting. I am likely appearing to you as a younger person?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“I can not give you an official explanation. I do not have one myself. When I was in your shoes, the way I came to understand it is that spirits take shape differently than the physical body. My presence is in spirit, so that will be how I appear to you, or another one like you.”

This must have appeased my hesitance, because my thoughts again began to swirl.

“We can talk more on the way to the house. I have an idea of how you can approach this conversation with Aldous, I do hope Ginny is not home alone when we arrive.”

We returned to the car, and though I was completely entranced, I deftly responded to Edith’s negotiation with the physical realm. My understanding of this shifted reality grew moment to moment; I was a germinated seed taking root and unfurling toward the sun. Edith was my sun. My loquacious, delightful sun.

“You’re going to want to find your way back to the county road, then we will continue on to town. You must be hungry! You haven’t eaten a thing since we met.”

My stomach gurgled at her mention of food. I wondered how I would make time going forward to manage my physical well-being while chauffeuring spirits around town.

We turned onto Al’s street, and I became nervous, pushing all other feelings into the background.

“It’s the little Colonial on the corner. Oh good, Al’s car is in the drive. Just go with our plan, you’ll be great!”

This being my first time on a worldly goods reconnaissance mission, I had yet to learn that going with the plan was never as simple as it sounded.

For the second time that day, I recalled my time in the girl scouts, this time re-living the sheer terror of approaching an unknown door to peddle cookies, goaded by a maternal figure, despite all of her prior warnings about interacting with strangers. Apparently that all gets called off if you need to sell your way to camp.

The door opened slowly, and before I could clearly make out the figure behind the screen door, Edith’s dissatisfied hiss signaled that Ginny stood before us. Though I’d tuned it out earlier, I gathered enough information from Edith’s misgivings about her daughter-in-law to know that she was incredibly pragmatic and organized. A new approach snapped in to place.

“Hello, my name is Rhoda Jean and I’m collecting old yearbooks to earn my Community History badge. Do you have any yearbooks that you would like to contribute?”

Ginny stepped out on to the porch, squinting in the late afternoon light. She looked at me skeptically, and smiled secretively. “My husband has a box of his mom’s dusty old books. Do you mind if I give you the whole box? Take what you need and dispose of anything else. Our house is overrun with her archives!”

Edith clucked with a mix of relief and disdain.

“Gladly. I’m happy to be of service.” I was going to recite the Girl Scout pledge, but realized that this may oversell it, and also I couldn’t remember past On my honor, I will try. I was not a good Girl Scout.

Ginny returned bearing the box and heaved it gladly into my arms. She made a show of wiping her hands free of its contents.

“Good luck with your badge! Please stop in when you’re selling cookies– I love those coconut things.”

“Yes, we all do.” I smiled and took the box back to the car.

“What a square!” snickered Edith as Ginny retreated into the house.

I placed the box in the trunk, lifting the lid so Edith could confirm that the book of concern was there. She nodded approvingly.

“Would you mind giving me a lift back?”

Her question surprised me, and hinted that she was not going to be around as long as I’d hoped. I opened the door to show my willingness to share the road home. She smiled softly, possibly noticing my concern.

“Let me know what you’d like me to do with the books.”

“If you wouldn’t mind just keeping them around for a while so they don’t fall into the wrong hands, I would appreciate it.” She sounded grateful, but tired. I wondered if I could ask her to stay.

We drove back in relative silence. I was able to make it to my house with little direction. I pulled into the alley, hoping my parents were not curious about my missing car and self.

I opened the passenger door, and Edith sprang out for the last time.

“Well, I do think I should embark on the return to my realm. Thank you again for sharing your time, lovely girl. I hope to see you again. Best luck to you on your journey!” She embraced me a final time, and walked down the street toward the school.

I have always wished that I asked her to stay on longer.