“The Lao think the foggy mists are ghosts, and I do, too.”
—Anne Lamott, Stiches, A Handbook on Meaning, Hope, and Repair
What is it?” Lori asked me. It was early when we stepped out on the front porch.
I’d never seen anything quite like it.
Usually, we sit on the back porch in warm weather, read our Bibles, share our “thankfuls” from the day before, and sometimes read a smattering of devotional literature. But that day, our view of the knobs from the back having been obscured by the early morning fog, we had migrated to the front porch, in the direction of the sun, which had begun to peek over the eastern horizon.
And that’s when the mystery appeared. I couldn’t call it a mist; it was too thick; it wasn’t exactly fog either, at least not like one I’d ever seen. At first, I thought it was sawdust. Only it was clear and clean. Then I guessed it was some form of sap floating through the air, but I quickly dismissed that hypothesis.
“It’s fog,” I declared, a bit agitated that Lori didn’t see it for what it was but at the same time, still confused as to what it was, as if by naming it, I could make it be what it was supposed to be.
“It looks like Harrison, when we released him on the ship,” Lori said, as matter-of-factly as if she had just seen a bird land in our yard or a school bus pass down the road.
I immediately knew what she meant: Lori was referring to the time we were on a cruise seven months after Harrison’s untimely death. The cruise line had permitted us to spread his ashes at sea, on the day of his birthday. The wind had swept the ashes into the air outside the lower deck after I opened the urn. We all watched as the wind dispersed the dust until it finally disappeared across the water. Then we all laughed because the wind had blown some of his ashes back onto me. “Just like Harrison,” I had said, chuckling to the others that day in the Caribbean. “Like he’s saying, ‘Back atcha,’ making sure we knew he was here.”
Some think there is something mysterious to the mist or fog or whatever it was I saw on the front porch a few days ago. They call it “ghost mist.” You won’t find it among the five types of fog commonly listed by weather experts. A significant number of people, particularly in Asian countries, believe in paranormal activity, some of which involves the appearance of ghosts. They classify what I saw as “ecto-mist,” which refers to a type of ghostly encounter.
I’m skeptical.
My left side brain, the theologically-trained, rationally-weighted side of my cerebral hemisphere, says, “No way.” And besides, I’ve got Scripture on my side, “To be absent from the flesh is to be present with the Lord.”
But then, the right brain, emotional-oriented, intuitive-laden, side of me objects, “Don’t you remember that vision you had of your brother after he died when you were only five? And what about the music box “randomly” playing Katri’s favorite song in the middle of the night, months after she died? And how can you explain the smell of the coffee Harrison had given you the night he passed, at 3 a.m.?”
I have no answers that explain away those mysteries.
Neither do I know about ghost mists, but I do believe the God who makes the clouds “his chariot,” and the wind “his messengers” (Psalm 104:3,4) can do what he wants with mist or fog. At the graveside I often say the words, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” Maybe in time, from the ashes and dust, our bodies return to mist as well. Through the fog or “ecto-mist” of a Kentucky morning, God can surely make one of his loved ones seem present to us, reminding us that those who have died are not so far away.
As for Lori and me, all we could say as we closed the front door and walked back inside was, “Good morning, Harrison, thank you for the surprise visit.”