I understood, I told her. Don’t be sorry.

The ancient Greeks divided ghosts into several types: idolon, aoroi, ataphoi, umbra, larva, lemure, imago, plasma, effigy, mane, muliebris. Canadians have their windigos and the Inuit their angiaks. The Japanese, their voluptuous, vulpine kokitenos. As long as there is space and time and real estate, there will be ghosts. There are ghosts who distress, ghosts who simply wish to impress, and ghosts here to redress their crimes; there are poltergeist ghosts who play pranks, housekeeper ghosts who clean without thanks, avaricious ghosts who rob banks; there are ghosts of the theater, ghosts of the opera, ghosts of the cinema; there are ghostly miners digging in coal-stained overalls; there are ghostly bakers preparing ectoplasmic croissants; there are ghostly surgeons performing ghostly operations; there are ghosts inhabiting ghost towns in the American West; there are ghostly traveling circuses and ghosts on skates circling roller rinks, and gleeful ghosts sledding down wintry slopes; there are ghosts dancing across the floors of the Ozone Disco in the Philippines who were dancing in the club when it collapsed; there are ghostly hotel guests and ghostly bellhops; there are ghosts in tennis matches, the ghost of a jockey galloping on top his horse at Happy Valley Racecourse in Hong Kong, and the ghost of Andrew Irvine, who perished ascending Everest in 1924 and has stayed to assist struggling mountaineers; there are ghostly deep-sea divers who succumbed to the bends, strapped onto ghostly oxygen tanks; there are ghosts who operate ghostly ships, dirigibles, and trains; there is my text-message ghost; then there is the ghost of my wife.

We didn’t discuss what we would be like as ghosts ourselves, or, when one of us died, if we would return to haunt the bereaved spouse. I imagine I would be a rather bumbling spirit, unsure whether to stay or leave, and in the interim I’d try to be helpful by organizing the pantry or tossing junk mail. My wife, however, would not have opted to become a ghost—she was the decider in our relationship—but by refusing to let go of our ghost hobby I was turning her into one, an entity in my mind that was and was not my wife. A memory is altered each time it is recollected, so whenever I long for my wife I lose her more and more. That’s another fact in support of the existence of ghosts: for what could be more ghostly than missing someone so intensely that you can no longer remember her as she was?

not setsuko

Unlike most mothers, I gave birth to my daughter Setsuko not once, but twice. The first was a sunny day in the middle of summer, and she came without complication. It was an easy, joyful birth. The second was a stormy afternoon ten years later to the date. I was induced in the same private hospital, under the care of the same doctor—with the same laser-whitened smile, he had apparently delivered the babies for some of L.A.’s most famous actresses. That time, however, Setsuko was taken out of me by emergency caesarean. She was breeched, and the umbilical cord was suffocating her slowly, knotted around her neck. Ever since, I have worried about the effect this may have had upon her reborn psyche.