I Believe in Ghosts by Valentina Fuentes Jimenez

There is no scientific evidence that ghosts exist. The idea of a nebulous image of a dead person appearing before the living feels surreal. And, in that sense, maybe it is. But I believe that to have faith in something is to create a personal connection, to imbue it with meaning that resonates with our own lives. That allowed me to find faith in ghosts. For a long time, I’ve believed that ghosts are memories that refuse to leave, a feeling that lingers even when time tries to erase it. They are reminders of a time that has passed, like a presence of something that once mattered, and I believe that such a feeling can evoke memory

When I was little, my grandmother and I would spend hours together in her living room building puzzles. I remember how I always wanted to sit on my iPad instead, but she promised to bring out a tub of cookies after we finished, a little bribe I always fell for. She loved puzzles, but I know it was less about them and more about the time she spent with me. She would always want to know everything about the people she cared for, and had little activities to try and get to know everyone all better. For me, it was puzzles. I can still see it: pieces spread out on the glass table, her sitting in a large chair, pointing to ones I had missed. She would ask me to tell her stories about school, my friends, about things I thought were unimportant until she made me feel like they were the most important things in the world. She had a way of making time feel slower, as if nothing outside that room mattered. She was a great listener. I remember vividly how she would ask me to repeat the same story multiple times, like I was some talented storyteller. I didn’t know then that she was already starting to forget.

At first, it was little things. A misplaced word, a story she’d ask for twice in the same afternoon. I never really noticed what was really happening, because she was still herself. Then, one day, a few months before I moved away, she asked what we were doing. We had been working on the same puzzle for about an hour when she asked that question, and I knew something was wrong. I still remember it today, and I forever regret not telling my parents about that moment, so they would have known earlier. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer's exactly 1 year and 9 months later. A disease that made her own brain, what fundamentally makes her who she is, betray itself, pushing her own life away.

That summer I left. My family and I moved 5,348 miles away from the only world I knew, and had to start over. Life got busy, and months stretched into years. By the time we were able to come back to visit, almost 4 years later, she was different. The sound of her voice, the warmth of her words had vanished. She was nonverbal, as her disease had taken away her words. She needed help putting her coat on. She needed my grandfather to feed her. I will never forget the look of exhaustion but pure love on his face when he raised the spoon to her mouth. I thought, how could my grandmother, who loved to talk so much, be so quiet? The woman who once hung onto my every word, just sat silent. I decided to sit by her, to try to feel that sense of comfort again. For a long moment, she did not look at me. Fixated on buildings far away, I felt myself slipping. Why didn't she run into my arms after so many years? I couldn't stop thinking of all the questions she would have for me if she was truly here. I started to think that maybe I really had lost my grandmother. I was torn.

And then, she saw me.

Her eyes passed over me slowly, searching, and for a moment, I feared I was another nameless visitor to her in a life that had become blurred. A life her own brain had pushed away. But then, suddenly, her gaze softened, and even though she said nothing, I knew. I was not a memory, not a name, but a feeling. Though she could not place me, she knew that I once meant something to her.

I am her ghost. I exist in the space between knowing and forgetting. Somewhere far into the corridors of my grandmother's beautiful mind I am sitting with her, building a large puzzle, talking until the end of forever. This is what ghosts really are, not what's missing, but the feeling that memories were once there, and that is enough evidence to prove that they happened. I still exist within her, my dad still exists within her, her husband, my siblings, my cousins. I know she feels our presence, and that is proof that her life was so full of love, that even time cannot erase her memories.