Don't Probe the Ghost
T.J. and I have a little project going to revamp our bathroom. We live in a condo that I bought in 2020 when I moved to Maine; the building is 114-years-old. Before this place, I resided in a basement apartment outside of Boston that was akin to a studio. It was a hobbit home; the walls were growing mold and when I looked out the window I saw the soles of people’s shoes. And before that, my adult years were kind of nomadic. I was traveling often, but there was an apartment that for a period of time I would regularly return to; that was the last time I did any renovation work on a bathroom.
From 2012-2016, I lived in Brighton—a low key neighborhood in Boston. I moved there soon after college and rented one of three bedrooms from a married couple. I was young and remember thinking that one day I wanted to be like them. And in true manifesting form, that’s what happened. They moved out, I had some years of roommates, and then found myself nesting with Sergiusz Scheller from Poland. We wed soon after his arrival in America and—boom—there it was: I was now the married couple with the extra bedroom. Sergiusz’s parents visited us from Poland around that time and, as a wedding gift, they helped us fix up our bathroom. They knew that improving it would help us rent the spare room on AirBnb.
My in-laws, Danuta and Aleksander, were basically professional renovators (although their job titles were much more impressive than that). They were engineers. Aleksander was known as one of the best property inspectors in Poland and Danuta managed construction sites (her stories included managing a bunch of men in Bulgaria during communism times). The two met at work and made a great team. They ripped out our vanity, replaced the caulking on the tub, and painted the walls. We never asked the landlord if this was okay, but Danuta promised that we were doing him a favor. All this work happened late at night while drinking bottles of red wine.
If you’ve read anything I’ve written before, then you probably know what comes next in my life. Just before our first wedding anniversary, Sergiusz died; he had a heart attack on a Thursday evening at home. It happened to be a day when we had an AirBnB cancellation and I feel grateful that no one else was there. Trauma has a sick way of making you count your blessings even when the unimaginable happens. After his death, I never again returned to that apartment except to pack it up.
In the years that followed, Danuta and I would become closer and closer. Every time I nested in a temporary home, and especially when I moved into this permanent home here in Maine, she invested in my experience. Sometimes that meant depositing a little money in my bank account or sending me links to things she thought I could buy. But mostly it meant that she wanted pictures of everything, especially the detail shots. She had to be part of the process. She didn’t just want to see the library I was building, but was curious what the construction of it looked like and who was helping me. And when it came time to purchase my first big-girl couch, she encouraged me to go outside my comfort zone and get one that was pink and velvet.
That specific purchase was a complicated one. When the couch arrived in the spring of 2022, I flipped out. The pink of it burned my eyes and for months I covered it with a sheet while making plans to exchange it for something blue. But the couch took on a whole different meaning when Danuta passed away that summer. Suddenly it was a sentimental symbol—a snuggly pink velvet one.
Danuta died on August 20, 2022. I always knew that her passing was going to be like having to mourn Sergiusz all over again. I was prepared for that part of the grief. What I wasn’t prepared for was losing the mother-daughter relationship we had grown after I was widowed. It wasn’t just the corners of my home that she wanted to know about, it was all the corners of my life. She cared about the details of my day-to-day more than anyone had since her son was alive.
I barely mourned her. It was just too big and complicated of a death. There is a story to write about the experience of witnessing her dying, which was preceded by a couple years of cancer. There is so much I need to put on paper, but it hasn’t yet felt possible to touch the pain and make sense of the memories. Writing—which has always been my preferred form of therapy—has had a hard time showing up for me while navigating this loss.
I think about Danuta every day and on a few occasions she has come to me in dreams. I know her spirit wants some of my time, but it wasn’t until a couple weeks ago that her ghost showed up to demand it of me.
For this new round of bathroom renovations, T.J. and I are planning to take out the old wooden vanity that came with the condo and replace it with a pedestal sink; we also want to paint the tile floors and build more shelves. This doesn’t take care of all of the needs of the bathroom, but those are the projects we can take on right now.
Like any good renovation team, we knew we needed all the pieces before we could start and the sink was the biggest question mark. T.J. took to good ol’ Craigslist (the same place I met that married couple I lived with in Boston) and found one for sale about an hour away.
We drove to pick it up a few Sundays ago. We pulled into a big antique-filled lot at the edge of a suburban-style neighborhood in a rural area, and were greeted by a spunky older woman in black yoga pants and a leopard-print shirt. She had long blond hair and a floppy hat protecting her from the sun. She waved to us enthusiastically and thanked us for coming on time. Her accent was undeniable. “I’m from Poland,” she said when I asked where she was from. “Krakow.”
I told her that I used to live there and offered a few Polish phrases I remembered. As she showed us the sink, I impressed her by saying “pyszna zupa” which means “delicious soup.” It was heartwarming to feel her excitement. She asked me why I lived there and I simply said because of family. I didn’t have the energy to explain the details of the dead.
As T.J. examined the sink and began putting it into the back of our car, she told us about her passion for holistic medicine. “You should always have cayenne extract in the home,” she told us. “If someone ever has a heart attack, this is what you mix with warm water to help save them.” She paused and then continued, “You know, like an old neighbor or something.”
She then asked if she could show us her “she-shed” as she called it. It was a basic shed that she was outfitting with decor from Poland. We accepted her offer and with sincere curiosity peeked into her life. The inside looked like an overflowing antique store that I would have loved to browse.
She wanted to show us more. There was a loneliness about her that I clocked. An energetic fear. More than once she mentioned wanting to move to northern Maine so she could “hide.” I didn’t pry about what she meant even though I wanted to. Rather, I said that we had to go and expressed our gratitude. “It’s so nice to meet someone from Poland,” I said. “I miss it there.”
Before we got into the car, I asked for her name realizing we had skipped that formality at the start. “It’s Diana,” she said. “But that’s in English. In Polish, my name is Danuta.”
I stared at her. “Danuta?” I replied. “That was my mother-in-law’s name.”
She spoke more, encouraged by the connection. She said a lot more words before we finally left, but none of it registered. No one in that moment could interrupt my own thoughts. Danuta, I kept repeating to myself as my mind wrapped around some spiritual disbelief.
As we drove home, I asked myself if I should have spent more time with this woman. There is a version of me from years ago who would have engaged her in the details of my life. The journalist in me would have befriended her and asked about her story and shared enough of mine that she felt comfortable letting me in. I could tell she wanted the friendship and her yard full of stuff definitely invited questions. There was the rotted out shell of a Corvette. And the Statue of Mary Magdalene that had been situated behind the sink we bought. Mary had beads around her neck and was wearing some buddhist-vibed clothing. There was a row of patio chairs up against her doublewide trailer-style home, many in a state of deep disrepair. I thought about the relationship that could have been, but decided I didn’t want to probe the ghost.
But, it turned out the ghost decided to probe me. This past week, I cracked. It was the two year anniversary of Danuta’s death (my Danuta) and the tears finally came. I finally felt ready to grieve and to miss her. It finally felt safe to be sad. And it’s really really sad. My mother-in-law was one of the greatest women I’ve ever known. And she loved me in a way that I’d never known. She was too strong sometimes and always looked put together even on her most pain-filled days. She was a caretaker even when she was sick, and always let herself have a glass of wine if it meant she could celebrate what was happy. Danuta was magic. Every time I was in Poland, she kept me up all night engaging me in deep conversation. She was the woman who learned English for me and without knowing it gave me the name of my book. She was ahead of her time and yet from another time. And she certainly can hear my thoughts as I write this right now. She was my mother, a second one. And I was her daughter.
It’s a good feeling to mourn even if it has taken me two years to get here. I’ve been writing stories about her all week. I’ve cried a lot. I’ve had a yahrzeit candle burning. And I feel comforted. I feel sad and it feels healthy. I feel at ease.
But, I can’t have the last word in this story about the ghosts who prick and prod and demand our time. To give Danuta, my beautiful, badass, forever present mother-in-law the final thing to say, here are her words gifted to me the year after her son—my husband—passed away: “Honey, if anyone ever thinks that time is a pill for our loss, he is stupid.”
For More…
More of Danuta’s legacy can be found in We Share The Same Sky
For those who have listened to the We Share The Same Sky podcast, you have heard Danuta’s voice. Her and my father-in-law are featured in the final episode. For those who are not familiar with the podcast or book, a small spoiler is that Danuta is the one who gifted me the words “we share the same sky.” In 2016, during the first Christmas season without her son, she said those words and it changed my life. Danuta’s insight into the human experience helped me better understand myself and shone a light on the core of the stories I wanted to tell. Here is an excerpt from the book when I tell that part of our story:
One night, [Danuta] said to me, “I remember when Sergiusz began university and went to London; and then when he decided to go study in Israel, my mother would say to me, ‘How could you let your son leave? How could you allow him to be so far from you?’ And I always told her that I didn’t have Sergiusz for myself. I had him so he could live his life, not accompany me through mine. And when he moved to America to be with you, I told him not to worry about being so far away from us. I told him, ‘We share the same sky. We look at the same stars. So we are close.’”
Listen: On Being with Krista Tippett featuring Atul Gawande
As I was working on this essay, I listened to an episode of On Being with Krista Tippett where she interviews Atul Gawande about mortality and meaning. I thought the episode was brilliant and recommend it for any of us and all of us.
Hi Rachael,
I love how you and your Danuta came to bond and fill the empty space in both your lives. Well written and accessible. When I lost my mom in 2019, it was losing a part of myself. My oldest niece eulogized her; "grandma was a badass." I think of her, the enormous impact she had on me, now that I read your piece. Thank you.
Btw, i signed up for your 3-week TBE workshop, but couldn't make last week. I look forward to seeing you this coming Sunday evening.
This had me in tears by the end. To Danuta!