Are You Still Haunting Bitches, Yes or No?

A promise is a promise.

Jane Russell in Young Widow (1946)

A few weeks ago, I traveled to Asia for my late husband’s best friend’s wedding. While I was away, my friend Ana—a new friend whom Rob never had the chance to meet—stayed at my apartment and watched my cat, Walter. When I returned, she told me about an odd experience she had one evening: The television turned on by itself.

“I wondered if it was Rob playing a joke on me,” she said. 

I was skeptical. Turning on the TV to scare someone he doesn’t know wasn’t Rob’s style. I didn’t tell her that. Instead, I very matter-of-factly blurted out, “Well, he did die right here.”

Here referred to the spot I was standing, which was in the living room, across from the TV, the far left side of where the couch was currently situated. In fall of 2022, it was moved over a few feet to provide space for the hospital bed Rob lay in for most of that two-month period he underwent home hospice. 

“Oh,” she said, followed by a nervous huff of laughter.

There was a brief discussion about smudging the house. A quick Google reminded me that people sage a house to get rid of negative energy. But what if too much of Rob’s energy dissipates as a result? Do I even believe in this shit? Not really, but I’ve convinced myself that whatever energy Rob was carrying, it was true to him and his journey, and I want it to linger. Or maybe I want it to fester.

I hesitate to say that I live in a haunted house, but I am haunted in my house. 

Rob and I exchanged countless texts in the weeks leading up to his death. We were right next to each other—him in the hospital bed, me lying on the couch beside him—but sometimes, this was easier than talking. 

Three days before he died, I was in the midst of a breakdown, and I texted, “I just need to know that I’ll get through this and still have you as a part of me forever.”

“Both of those are 100% guaranteed, I will never leave you,” he wrote, playfully adding. “I’ll haunt the shit out of you and Walter.”

“Yes you better,” I replied. 

Perhaps he said this for my benefit. Rob didn’t believe in ghosts. Or haunted houses. He had little tolerance for the supernatural, horoscopes, and anything that could be considered woo-woo or “California bullshit.” We met a medium at a party once. Rob was polite but later expressed how appalled he was by her, convinced that she was an emotionally manipulative scammer. I didn’t disagree, but I also believe in ghosts, and I know the big three of my birth chart (Scorpio sun, Libra moon, Leo rising), and while I don’t go out of my way to attend sound baths, I’ll go when invited, which suggests that my patience for California bullshit was and may always be much higher than his.

Still, a promise is a promise. He’s here, with me, somehow, some way. If I ever move, he’ll have to pack his bags too. 

Death is a cunt I had no choice but to quickly become acquainted with. And watching her do her work so slowly made me all the more unflappable about it. 

Part of me regretted being so blunt with Ana about where Rob died, even though it wasn’t exactly a secret. All my friends know he died in our apartment. But only the closest friends who visited him during those last weeks and actually saw him, impossibly small, laying in that bed would have known where. 

But I don’t have time to feel precious about the fact that Rob died in the same spot that I now binge-watch episodes of Law and Order SVU and music videos on MTV Classic. It’s just a fact. Like the fact that a third of Rob’s ashes are sitting on a shelf in my living room, part urn, part vase, bearing the engraving “Rob, our love still grows.” It’s just that I forget that not everyone is prepared for widows to be so matter-of-fact about the thing that made them a widow in the first place.

I carry the macabre with me in the form of talismans. I have a ring that has some of Rob’s ashes mixed into it. I wear a gold necklace engraved RS + AR, and it contains Rob’s ashes and hair. Now, in response to people’s cooing condolences, I say, “Well, he’s still here with me” and offer an impromptu tour of my jewelry. I’m never sure if the “oh wow”s and “beautiful”s it garners are sincere. I’ve stopped caring. If anything, I gleefully launch into my plans for what to do with the locks of Rob’s hair that I cut after he died.

“I want to have it weaved into a necklace, like Victorian mourning jewelry,” I explain.

I get pained smiles in response.

Mourners get it. I know they do, because they’ve told me all the strange little things they cling to following the death of a loved one.

Hair is a big one.

Yesterday, the robot vacuum Rob bought me a week or two before he died had a malfunction. I had to clear out the rubber brushes, which lead to me digging out layer after layer of hair. I’d never cleaned this part of the vacuum before. I wondered if somehow Rob’s hair could have been mixed in with our cat’s hair, rug shavings, and the coarse ringlets I sometimes rip out of my scalp. I caressed the twisted melanges of hair as if there was something salvageable, as if a simple close inspection could result in me identifying Rob’s graying hairs amid the crud. I saved them. I’ll throw them out later today. I already have Rob’s hair in a plastic bag in my bedroom, pure and free of contaminants. Why do I need this?

I could practically hear Rob groaning as I placed the clumps of dirty hair in a brown paper bag I had take-out in earlier. “That’s so gross,” he’d say. “Just throw it away.”

I will, I will, I just need to look at it again first. Just one more time. Just to make sure I’m not throwing you away, too.

Death still scares me. I have enough medical trauma that may take a lifetime to unpack. From time to time I freeze at the top of the stairs of my apartment, suddenly hit with the memory of night after night of carrying Rob’s IV pole, with him attached via his feeding tube, carefully making my way down step by step, afraid that one wrong move would prove disastrous. 

We had a lot of tiffs on those stairs. “You’re walking too fast!” “Don’t freak out!” 

I like to believe that Rob has, in fact, kept his promise and is benevolently haunting the fuck out of me and our cat. But sometimes I think that the true haunts of a haunted house lie not in turning on TVs without warning, but in the memories that unfurl from the corner of a room, threatening to drown you if you keep looking, keep remembering, keep feeling.

♡ Ashley