The Wall

My oldest child, Alicia, began talking with she was just nine months old. Coming from a genetic disposition of talkers on both sides of her family, we were not surprised that this happened at such an early age. We were, however, extremely surprised that her first word was not a word at all but rather a first phrase. While most babies say, “mama,” or, “dadda,” or use the name of the family pet for their first word, Alicia, at the age of just nine months, uttered a phrase. The first time we heard it, both John and I looked at each other as if to ask, “Did YOU hear that, too?” and then we quickly shrugged it off. No way. No way was this little girl saying, “What’s that?” in a souvenir shop, each time she heard a bird call. But then a few seconds later, she said it again. After multiple bird calls and multiple, “What’s that?” there was no way we could deny it any more. And she hasn’t stopped chattering since! 

By the age of 18 months, she was speaking in complete sentences and you could carry on a conversation with her. Granted, the topic of the conversation was typically about her baby dolls, animals, or her favorite TV shows. She was not creating persuasive arguments about global warming or the government. The reason I share this is not to say what an amazing child she was or what amazing parents she had, both of which are true, I mean let’s face facts, right? I tell you this because it helps to understand her ability to communicate effectively at an extremely young age. And this fact allowed her to talk about the visits she received from her grandfather.  

My father died when I was just seven years old. That meant that my life was filled with major events that he never got to see. He wasn’t there for my 8th grade confirmation from church, my high school graduation, my first job, or my first car.He wasn’t able to walk me down the aisle on my wedding day. Although, if you ask anyone who was there he made his presence known on that day. My wedding day, a beautiful sunny day suddenly turned overcast and stormy. Just as the pastor welcomed everyone and said, “Grace be to God,” there was a clap of thunder so loud that several guests shrieked, the glass windows rattled and you could feel the rumble in your chest. I smiled, knowing my father was there in a spiritual way at least. Guests at the wedding talked about that thunderclap for years. A year and a half later, Alicia was born, but my father was never able to hold her.  He never held any of his eight grandchildren.

One day, sitting at my mother’s kitchen table, an eighteen-month old Alicia turned the pages of an old photo album that my mother had been pouring over. My mother loved pictures. She loved to haul out these photo albums and tell the same stories over and over about relatives who had long since departed. Alicia sat there, a cookie in one hand, flipping pages with the other, and she suddenly stopped. “Who’s that?” she asked, having long since added to the collection of questions she had started asking as an infant. 

“Oh, that’s your grandpa,” I told her as she pointed to a picture of my dad standing in our old living room, holding me as a baby. She said, “grandpa?” and I reassured her that yes, that was her grandpa. She then began to turn the pages in the photo album to find more pictures of him. “Grandpa?” she pointed and asked. “Yes,” I told her again, this time she pointed him out of a family photo. Page after page she went on, finding grandpa in picture after picture after picture.

A few weeks later, she was sitting in her high chair at suppertime. John and I were chattering about weekend plans, shopping lists, and the normal types of conversations that you have around the evening table when Alicia chimed in, “Grandpa came to visit me last night!” 

“Oh, he did?” I asked her, thinking that this would be an interesting story. 

“Yeah. He smiled at me.”

“Does he come up to you? Does he want to give you a hug?” I asked, just making sure there wasn’t an actual person sneaking into her room each night that we didn’t know about. 

“No!” she giggled. “I see him smiling from the wall. His face is on the wall!” she explained that he didn’t have a body as though this were the most natural thing to be talking about and I was silly for asking!

The next day, she said it again, but this time she told us at breakfast. “Grandpa came to visit me last night! I see his face on the wall!” And then it started to feel a little creepy, but creepy in an interesting way. For the next several weeks this pattern continued. Every few days, usually at breakfast, she would report that grandpa had come to visit her. She had now shown him her dolly and her blanket, she had talked to him while he smiled at her. I asked her if he had said anything to her, but no. She said that he just smiled at her. 

When we went to my mother’s house again, Alicia asked to look at the photo albums and once again began picking out pictures of my father from the many pages. Then something strange happened. She grabbed a photo album from decades earlier, a photo album that had pictures of my father as a little boy, a teenager, a young man who wasn’t yet thinking of marriage or a family of his own. And immediately, she picked him out. On one page, there was a group of young students, probably 8 or 9 years old, and Alicia immediately pointed to one small child and announced, “Grandpa!” I looked at my mom and asked her if that was really him. My mother stepped away from the sink where she was drying up some dishes, glanced over Alicia’s shoulder and proclaimed that yes, that was her grandpa when he was in elementary school. 

Obviously Alicia was pretty talented. Gifted even!

This pattern continued for several months. Alicia would point out her grandfather in picture after picture, album after album. She would report his visits to her and tell us what she had talked to him about. It almost became routine until one day when Alicia reported that she missed grandpa because he hadn’t come to see her for a while. She wanted to go see him and asked us to take her to visit him! She was about two years old by this time, and she had developed quite an obsession with death, cemeteries, and the afterlife. I explained to her once again that grandpa had died and that his body was in the cemetery. “Yeah, I know that,” she whined, “but I want to go see him!” We drove through the cemetery and I pointed out the location of his stone from the car as we drove by. “Hi, Grandpa!” she cheerily announced each time we passed that cemetery. She never said it when we passed other cemeteries, only that one. 

By the time she was three years old, this had become such a routine that we thought nothing of it. Day after day she would get up and report the conversations and visits she had from my dad. I would try to get her to relay messages to him from me, but that didn’t work. She had her own agenda and needed to talk about important things like her new jacket or eating the snow outside that she liked to play in. We all truly believed that his spirit was visiting her, and we were comforted by the idea. “Hi, Grandpa,” we all announced as we passed the cemetery. Several days a week she reported another visit where she saw his smiling face on her wall, and she continued to be fascinated by pictures of him at any age. She seemed to know him better than anyone else. Looking at a picture of him in his Navy uniform, my mother told Alicia a story of how grandpa used to be on a ship during the war. “I know!” Alicia proclaimed. “He told me!” 

Visits from grandpa were becoming routine, expected, and I loved every minute of it. Until one morning when Alicia woke us up extremely early, screaming and crying uncontrollably. 

“What’s wrong?” I hugged her as I picked her up from the crib. She couldn’t talk, she was crying so hard that her entire body trembled and shook as though she were having a seizure. I held her, rocking her back and forth, trying to sush her and soothe her. Finally, after several minutes she spoke. “Grandpa came to visit me.” she said as we had often heard before, but never before with tears. “He said he couldn’t come visit me anymore. Why can’t he come and visit me anymore? Why?” 

“I don’t know,” I told her. Did you ask him?”

“No,” she said. “I was sad. I don’t want him to go away. He said that he had to go, but I didn’t want him to,” and she began sobbing again. It again took her several minutes to calm down again and as soon as she could speak she once again asked me why he had to leave. I had no answer for her. 

“I’m sure he will come back and visit you again,” I told her, trying to be supportive. 

“No!” she yelled at me. “He won’t come back. He told me to give him a hug, and I did. And I kissed him on his forehead. I kissed him right on the owwie on his forehead,” she said pointing to a spot above her own eyebrow. “Then, he smiled at me and told me that he had to back behind the wall. Then he was gone! Why did he have to leave?” and again, she was sobbing. 

For days she talked about how grandpa had to go back behind the wall. She repeated the story over and over, reminding us how he had hugged her and how she had given him a kiss on his owwie. She was devastated. It seemed that nothing would help her to feel better, and I didn’t know what to do. When my mother called me one day, I told her about what had happened. I told her that grandpa wasn’t coming to visit her anymore and that Alicia had said goodbye to him. 

“She said that she gave him a hug and kissed him on the owwie on his forehead,” I told my mom. 

My mom was strangely quiet. For a long time. And then, she slowly gasped. “What? She said what?”

“She said that she gave him a hug and a kiss goodbye. Isn’t that sweet?” 

“Where did she say she gave him a kiss?” My mother asked with desperation in her voice. 

“On his forehead. Yeah, it was weird that she said he had an owwie on his forehead, right above the eyebrow.”

My mother gasped even louder. And then she almost whispered into the phone, “I never told anyone about that. How did she know?” 

“Know what?” I asked.

“When your father died, he fell out of his bed and when I found his body that afternoon, he was laying on the floor with his face towards the wall. When the ambulance came and got him, they put him on the gurney and he had a mark on his forehead where he must have hit the wall as he fell. It was right above his eyebrow. I have NEVER told anyone about that. I hadn’t even remembered it until you just said this!” 

And then it got even more real. 

But the story doesn’t end here, even though you may wish it would. There was more. 

Now, each morning, instead of Alicia waking to joyfully tell us of her nighttime visit with grandpa, she woke angry. She wanted to see him. She insisted that I let her see him. I tried to explain to her that I could not control these spirit visits that she was having, but how do you rationalize something like this to a toddler? She was angry, and determined. 

“Take me to see grandpa. RIGHT. NOW!!” 

So after weeks of this, John and I decided to take her to the cemetery and show her my dad’s gravesite. Maybe that would give her some kind of closure. We packed her into her little carseat and drove off to the cemetery. As we turned into the drive, she happily announced, “This is where grandpa is! Are we going to go and see grandpa?” 

“Grandpa isn’t alive honey. His body is here in the cemetery. He has been dead for a very long time,” I tried once again to explain. 

She said nothing as I unbuckled her and took her tiny hand to walk towards the mausoleum where my dad’s niche was located on the bottom row. We entered the little hallway and heard the recorded hymn music that seemed to play incessantly, like Christmas music in a mall. I stopped and turned to look at my father’s name etched into the stone. I stopped walking just in front of his stone and turned to face it. Alicia, still holding my hand, turned with me. I bent down and touched the letters of my father’s name and told Alicia, “This is where grandpa is.”

She suddenly dropped my hand as if it were on fire and took tiny steps backwards, away from the niche. “No! No! No!” She started yelling. “No! I don’t want him to be there.” And then she said the strangest thing. 

“Why did he have to back behind thenwall?” I stepped back and looked up at the mausoleum I had been coming to for years, and suddenly I realized. THAT was the wall she had been talking about. That was the wall he was referring to at the end of his last visit. He had to go back behind the wall. I had thought he was disappearing from view on her bedroom wall. “Is this the wall he told you about?” I asked her as she continued to stomp her feet in anger. 

“Yes! And I want him to come back and see me, but he has to stay behind this wall!” she said with tears streaming down her face. 

After that visit, she talked less and less about grandpa. She continued to enjoy finding his picture in photo albums and would talk about his visits, but over time she seemed more content as she ended conversations about him by saying, “He had to go back behind the wall.”

When I share this story with people, whether they believe in spirit visits or not, there is often the same reaction. The hair begins to stand up on their arms and the backs of their necks. We don’t know what to make of the spirit world. Certainly, I don’t understand it, but I do have comfort in my experiences with it.  

Now an adult, Alicia still remembers being visited by her grandpa. She still remembers seeing his face on her wall. She no longer remembers being able to pick out his picture in photo albums, nor does she remember the great shock she gave my mother when she reported her goodbye kiss to his forehead. 

But I think of it often, and feel happy in knowing that my father was there, most likely with all of his grandchildren, whether they realized it or not.