Spectating

         It’d been months since a spark of life graced this shell.  No, a shell has substance.  I glanced down, resigned to fate or maybe lack of fate.  Perhaps I’m a specter.  Hmm, maybe a ghost.  No, ghosts have jobs.  They have haunts.  Specters, on the other hand, spectate.

         I’d haunted a nursing home.  It’s considered bad sport by those in my profession to turn on a floor sweeper after hours, riding upon the steed as it floats down the hall, whistling a funeral dirge.  Eerily flickering lights, a suddenly slammed door.  Those were fair game.  The residents’ old bones needed excitement now and then. 

         Administrators don’t recognize their angels.  When Ms. Beauregard couldn’t remember her daughter’s face, her family forgot her.  It was too painful to hear her say she never had a daughter and too embarrassing to watch her courting other residents having forgotten her husband.  Like most maidens of a sprightly ninety-three, she was rejected more often than not. 

         We helped the all-too-common Ms. Beauregards find a sliver of solace.  I took care to pen her heartfelt love letters, told her she is and always will be the apple of my eye -- signed, a secret admirer.  When she read those lines, when she pressed them to her trembling lips, a light rekindled itself in her eye, and for a moment only, I felt its reflection in my own.

         A man of my age will never find another job.  Now I’m a ghost.  No, a specter.  I spectate.  I don’t haunt. 

         What hurts most is not that the nursing home downsized its cleaning staff.  It’s that I fear I may forget my past life as Ms. Beauregard’s family chose to forget her: easing the pain of endings and beginnings while losing a piece of yourself in the past.