How does one have a conversation with a ghost?

Where does a circle end? Where does it start?

How does one tell a story with no beginning and no end? Where do I even start?

Unlike those fairy tales we grow up hearing our parents read to us or the ones that are so old that we now call them gospels, real life doesn’t always come with a neat ‘in the beginning’ … 

And how does one have conversations with a ghost? How can I find answers I desperately want from someone who “passed” 20 years before I was born?

If I were an aborigine, I might have a clue. A few years ago, I watched a NOVA special where an elder talks about how ancestors become the world around you, the stones, the trees, the dirt, and how they “speak” to you if only you know how to listen. And then he would walk up to a stone wall where his tribe believed those ancestors would communicate with the living, and he would sit there, patiently “listening” for those messages from an ancient past.

But that perspective is not likely to be well regarded in the West, certainly not in a “science”-centric culture. But I am not a scientist, and this is not a scientific journey. So, I am willing to consider the possibility that there are other ways of finding answers to the unknowable, even if those answers are less than “rigorous” by today’s standards.

The stories you will find here will not have that neatly structured format that a storyteller is supposed to follow, a beginning, a middle, an end; preferably a “happy” or at least hopeful ending. There are going to be a lot of unknowns, a lot of uncertainties, a lot of ambiguities. No easy black and white situations, no perfect heroes or irredeemable villains – well, there may be a couple of those as history proved them to be. Life and the truth is rarely that uncomplicated.

I will do my best to give you the good, the bad and the ugly about the individuals involved, about humanity in general. I am not one to shy away from harsh truths, and I have always strived – if not always successfully – to dig deeply into those areas that most of us go to great lengths to avoid. I will not always be able to give answers, satisfying explanations or comforting perspectives. On a good day, I have more questions than I have good answers. But that has never been a reason for me to stop seeking those answers. If only I could spend a day or two inside the mind of one of those aborigine elders … the best I can do is to look at all these mysteries from as many angles as I can, find ways to triangulate the historical context, the political, social and cultural stage the characters in this story travelled in, what I know about the psyche of the human creature and my own experiences being a member of this family system and put forth my best explanation of how these things played out then and how they are still echoing through the generations since.

Most people believe there is no point in looking back, no point in “remembering,” especially if the things to be remembered are as devastating and tragic as so much of this family’s past has been. But I strongly disagree with that perspective. I always have and I always will. You cannot convince me that “forgetting” the past is going to prevent it from affecting your present or the future of the next generation.