Ellen Cooke
Photo by Steinar Engeland.
My mother has seen more ghosts than anyone I know. I am not sure why, although I once read that there is some correlation between allergies and sensitivity to such things. Certainly my mother has worse allergies than anyone I’ve ever met, and a constitutional disinclination to seek treatment. Also, the barriers between her emotional states have always seemed unusually porous—she can switch from anger to sadness to laughter to unfettered generosity with dizzying speed and total commitment—and maybe that applies to the barriers between the living and spirit realms, too.
The first ghost my mother ever saw was her dead best friend. Although I’ve known about the sighting all my life, I don’t know very much about theme song at the top of their lungs. The car was driven by my mom’s high school boyfriend, Tom Alvarez, who would go on to become attorney general of a Great Plains state. My mother always says it was a “very innocent” relationship.
