Nannie's Voice

This is my first and my favorite ghost story but I write out of order.

My great grandmother died in our house in Lutherville when I was fourteen.  She was 97 and had been an invalid for half my life at that point.  The Sunday she died, she looked like she had fallen asleep in her chair.

In the last month of her life, she spouted scripture verbatim.  In the last week of her life, she told us that her long dead siblings were showing up to visit her. 

“Jenny was here,” she said.

A week after my great grandmother passed, I was in my bedroom, answering a homework question on the silent character of Nanny in Paul Zindel’s play The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-on-the-Moon Marigolds.  Everyone called my great grandmother Nannie. 

In her last six months, Nannie forgot how to use her intercom system to call for help and would just randomly call our names, her voice wavering but honeyed.  My bedroom was above what had been hers so I could hear her best. As I thought about the character of Nanny that spring night, I heard her voice call my name.  Once.  I turned.  Nothing had changed in my room.  She called again.  She sounded calm and I knew she was safe.  I knew she was home.  And I knew that energy does not die.

My matriarch:  Nannie in the glasses, her daughter and my grandmother Marjorie, and her daughter and my mother Susan in the hat, in a crab house in New Jersey