GHOST STORY

As soon as my head hit the pillow, I began to dream. I was with my friend Sarah in her home on Catherine Street in South Philly, and we were walking from room to room in her rowhouse, which was completely empty of furniture. Neither of us spoke. There was no sound at all, not even the clicking of our shoes on her finished pine floors. Occasionally, our eyes would meet and she would flash me the smile I had seen from her a thousand times. I had last seen it through her oxygen mask. “Hey, Dragon,” I had said. “We've got to get you out of here.” And she smiled at hearing her nickname.

A week after that visit to her hospital room was the last time I saw her. She was still at Pennsylvania Hospital, and still in intensive care. She was alone in a room, supine on her bed, snoring rhythmically, hooked up to tubes and monitors that beeped quietly in the twilight. I watched her for a few minutes, then stepped out and found the nurse.

“I'm a friend of Sarah's,” I said. “What can you tell me? Is she...still there?”

“Sarah is not conscious any longer,” she told me. “We met with her family yesterday and treatment has been stopped, except for measures that will make her comfortable.”

I went back into the room and watched her breathe. Her cheeks were sunken into her face and her skin was pale and paper-thin. There wasn't much left of her anymore. Later, I learned she had lasted only a few more hours.

The dreams came about a week later, and though they were not unpleasant or frightening, I could not escape them. The first time, I awakened, shook my head, stared into the darkness for a minute, and then laid my head back upon the pillow. Instantly, I was back in her empty house with her next to me, walking through the house, floating effortlessly up the stairs and down again, and then the smile. Always the smile.

It continued all night. Though the dreams themselves were not nightmarish in any way, I began to feel trapped in them, and each time I awoke, I felt more and more uneasy. To banish them, I got out of bed, went to the john, checked the time, looked out the window, and consciously thought of other things in the hope my dreams would change. Sledding, fish in an aquarium, Chase Utley turning a double-play---anything to get my head out of that rowhouse. None of it worked. As soon as I closed my eyes, there she was, next to me---my drinking buddy, my racetrack buddy---now silent, now a wraith, but still my companion.

I awoke in the morning hardly rested at all and headed to the kitchen for a cup of strong coffee. I am a rational person. I am sometimes criticized for being too rational. However, I could not dismiss from my mind the legend or old wives' tale or whatever-it-is that the recent dead wander among us for a while before they find their rest. I am aware there are psychological explanations for what I experienced, but the feeling persists that this was not entirely a dream or a series of dreams. The feeling persists that it was Sarah.

The next night, I went to bed with some trepidation, but as I settled in and the haze of sleep began to descend upon me, I suddenly knew it was over, and that she would not return. “Goodnight, Sarah,” I whispered. “Goodbye, Dragon.”

There was no response.

Copyright2013MichaelKubacki