Upon later reviewing the newspaper articles around the event, I built the following timeline:
The elderly mother and father had been out shopping for their Christmas meal earlier that day. They’d been running errands from place to place, picking up all of the various parts of the dinner, when their car had been blindsided by an 18-wheeler that had failed to stop at a red light. It was unclear how far they’d gotten in their errands or even at what exact time the accident happened as no groceries were found in what remained of their car at the accident site, and charges were registered on their credit cards immediately following the projected time of the accident.
I’d run into the couple in the apartment building a few times before, and it got to the point where I could tell when they were expecting their family to visit as they’d be positively aglow with anticipation. The love I saw in them…it was very clear that they lived for their children and their grand children.
And what if love was enough? What if it could make you live for the ones who meant most to you?
What if that elderly couple did live for their children and their grandchildren? What if that crash that was so sudden and such a surprise somehow went unnoticed. Though their physical bodies were ended in a pile of scrap and glass, what if their minds and their hearts continued on the vector they were already following: like momentum. They were so wrapped up in the errands they were performing and in the Christmas dinner that they had been so looking forward to that they didn’t want to miss it for anything.
So they didn’t.
The errands were run and the groceries were bought and brought back to their apartment in 2306, and they made a feast for their family. Their intentions were so pure that there was no distinguishing them from actions. Their family expected them to be there in that apartment, with a feast prepared, and the two of them wanted nothing but the same. And somewhere in that mess of emotions and expectations, an act of faith occurred. They were there, and the family did come, and it was a Christmas like any other.
The family left their parents that night, got on a plane the next morning, and were gone off on their one-month winter adventure. They missed the news reports, they missed the police calls, and they missed the disposal company trying to deliver the contents of their parents’ apartment. There were no life insurance policies, and there were no wills. By the time the young family returned home from their adventure, their parents’ case had somehow slipped through the cracks. When it came time for Family Day, when it came time for Easter and their daughter’s birthday, the young family visited their parents, and their parents were there for these family events that had always been observed so unfalteringly as to have become more than just routine.
What happened or where the parents went when the family wasn’t visiting, I don’t know. Maybe they still lingered in that apartment, living out the lives they’d forgotten to die at the end of, in some way we can’t understand. I know only that when I peaked through that mail slot, I recognized their furniture, and when the property manager took me into that apartment after I’d questioned her about it, there was nothing in it but months of dust.
Is it possible that you could become so wrapped up in something: so tenaciously invested in it that it could eclipse all else in your mind, even cause you to miss or forget your own death? Yes, should your body be destroyed, you would be dead, in a sense, but could the right impulse for love or justice or closure at the exact instant of death be what makes a ghost of you: what sets you off a-haunting?
Though the previous tenants were, in a way, forcefully evicted when their family, the last of the people who believed in them, were forced to face the truth, there is some evidence that some part of them lingers still. When questioned about how the whole story had made the new tenants feel, one of them said the following to the newspaper reporter:
“I don’t know. There’s just something about this apartment. Every time I come home, it feels warm. I’ll wake up in the morning and swear that I had just smelled fresh-baked bread and hot coffee. I feel safe here, even when I’m alone. Come to think of it, I’ve been living here for four months now, and even when my roommates are out, I never really feel alone in here.”
If you don’t believe me, go and ask her.
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