My Own True Ghost Story

by Tom Maszerowski

Everyone has a ghost story, of some kind. This is mine. Everything is as I remember it, but given that 32 years have passed, I’m sure there’s something I might have missed.

It’s necessary to first give you a little background information. My mother, Eleanor Maszerowski, a lifelong smoker, had died of cancer three days prior to my starting high school. It was the summer of 1971, I was fourteen years-old. I missed the first day of school, a Monday, because of the funeral.

To be honest, I was mentally prepared for her death, as she had been sick for a while, and I don’t think I cried as much then as I did later on. I still feel that shame to this day, but I was young and soon caught up in the life of a very competitive school. It’s not like I forgot her, I was simply taken up with other things. My father, on the other hand, was not so able to move on, and there were difficult times for him (this is not the place to detail those things, perhaps in another story). But we survived.

Later that Fall, in October if I recall correctly, a relative of my father passed away. The wake was in a Brooklyn funeral home and we went there one evening to pay our respects. The news of my mother’s death was still going around to the family and after we had said our prayers at the casket, we sat down in the funeral home chairs so that some relatives could talk with my father and offer their condolences on the loss of his wife.

We were sitting in one of the back rows, to be polite, I guess. There was a least one row of chairs behind us, though. As we sat, and the adults talked amongst themselves, I felt a hand on my shoulder, obviously from behind. This didn’t surprise me, since I was the “poor boy who had lost his mother” and Polish families tend to be “hands-on” when together.

What did surprise me, though, was the fact that there was no one sitting behind me, nor had there been at anytime. I didn’t realize it until the hand was no longer there, that was when I decided to turn around and see who was comforting me.

I didn’t understand what happened at first, but over time, I’ve come to believe that it was my mother, consoling me for the last time. I’ve never felt anything since like that, nothing to make me think she was still here. I miss her so.

And there it is, my own true ghost story. I’ve been afraid to write this down before, but there are times when you have to do things, despite your fears.