Stephen Heister responds to

Challenge 97

I hope this finds you well. I found your introduction to Kristen Tracey very interesting. I wouldn’t presume to guess her age, I’ve been slapped for that before. Also it makes me wonder if it would interesting enough to pretend to be someone else on the internet for a little while, especially if they already had some kind of presence. Live in their shoes so to speak.

It’s kind of funny, the first personal website I ever wrote still stands unchanged since the day I finished it when I was 17. I abandoned it for a while when I was traveling and living life. I forgot the password years ago, but still it stands. Getting enough traffic off normal search engines that the free hosting company has no reason to remove it. So it stands as a testimony to my thoughts and beliefs as a 17-year old. I can never change it, never delete it. When I was 17, I was a very different person; someone reading that today would have a completely different impression of me.

Here are my thoughts on Challenge 97, point number 1.

Mr. Ghost was broken. I think every married man has at one time thought about the death of his wife. In any terms, positive or negative. I myself have been carried away by the fantasy of living alone, easily isolating myself using my grief as a shield from things that I do not wish to interact with anymore.

“You’ll have to excuse Stephen,” they would say behind my back, “he lost his wife not long ago and his heart is broken.”

There is a certain mystery and allure to the widower, and most men know this. Some women believe that love can heal. Whether this is true or not I have yet to fully discover, but according to my wife, love can be a magic salve that restores someone to themselves. That is what I took away from the title, that’s what some women seem to feel and know: that their love can snap Mr. Ghost from his reverie and make him human again. Something “No (few) man (men) would understand.”

The identity of the first few calls is harder to determine. Perhaps it was “Lucy” all along. Or perhaps some other voice that was enough to awaken the need in Mr. Ghost for his own reconstruction, allowing him to go out and find “Lucy”.

Why did she disappear at the end? Perhaps he learned his lesson and didn’t need her any longer. Or perhaps, he “protested to much,” and missed out on his chance.

Thank you for the response, Stephen; it’s certainly a very thoughtful one. I hope other readers will pick up on your answers and respond with their own interpretations.

Woody Allen is reported as saying, “I’m not afraid of death, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” Well, not to worry: you won’t be. But your loved ones will, and it will be much harder for them than for you. Considering or facing the death of a spouse puts one’s entire relationship on a flat screen, as it were, frozen in time: you know for sure what you stand to lose. And we do not need Hamlet to remind us that we do not know what we stand to gain, whether by our own death or another’s.

Aside from that, I think you raise by implication three important questions. Since the answers deserve some thought, I’ll post them separately.

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