Ghost of a chance

I was instantly awake with my eyes wide open peering out into the darkness.
"What is it?" whispered Hitomi, sitting up in bed.
I am sure Sumomo had called out to me and through the wall I could hear Riko-chan crying. I grabbed my robe and putting it about me hurried to their room, Hitomi close on my heels.
I opened the door to their room, the bedside light was on, Riko was in Sumomo's bed crying and holding her close.
What's happened?" I asked.
"Grandmother was here" Sumomo answered and I could see even she was visibly shaken.
I sat down on the bed with my arms extended and they both came to hug me. Riko was really scared and sobbing her heart out. I asked Sumomo to tell me exactly what she had seen.
Sumomo said that she had been asleep and had heard Riko call out 'Obachan!' She turned and saw Obachan standing by the foot of the bed looking at them both and then she had simply disappeared. Riko scrambled across to be with her sister as Sumomo had put on the light.
Sumomo was being very brave but I could feel her trembling too as she held me.
Hitomi sat and cuddled Riko.
"You two were babies when Grandmother saw you and she loved you both. She couldn't stay and be with us today because she was very sick. This was her home once and uncle Hiro's restaurant was once grandmother's restaurant. I don't think she meant to scare you. She loved you both so very much and she would never have hurt you back then so do you think she would hurt you now?
She came to see her beautiful grandchildren growing. She came to see you back with me in your true home. She came to give you a loving smile and to show you how very proud of you both she is as she sees you both growing up to be wonderful girls."
I had said something to reassure them so they slowly settled for the night again. I promised that we would talk about this when they came home from school the following evening.

After we had returned from visiting the new school last week and they had listened to my stories of when I was a young girl in that school, I had shown them some old photographs of when I was a girl and they had seen me with my mother. In my mind this accounts for the imagery and of their grandmother being on their minds.
Riko had dreamed of her grandmother and had woken up and called out. This had disturbed Sumomo who was not fully awake when she turned to see what had distressed her sister and hearing 'Obachan' had thought she saw her too with a trick of the light and tired, not fully woken eyes..
I was quite distressed at seeing them so uncomfortable like that but it simply wasn't the right time to even try to rationalize it for them. They needed reassurance more than anything else in my mind and that's what I tried to give them.

There have been moments in my life that I have seen things which perhaps were not there. I'm sure most of you have a spooky tale where you thought you saw a spirit of a dead person.
In the cold light of day we can try to make sense of our experiences but at that moment they were emotionally troubled and more than anything else in the world they needed to hear the right things, agreeable things from someone they trust implicitly. I did not say they were being silly or that they had had a bad dream because that would not have been really acceptable to their minds in their emotional state.
 Once they had woken and lived a normal day, breakfast, schooled and came home could we all sit at the table after our meal and discuss it. People seem to prefer the intuitively direct and simple explanations to the often incomplete complicated ones. Things are 'as they seem' kind of explanations are so beautifully more acceptable. Many of us see things which are not there, especially at that moment between sleeping and wakefulness. If I dismissed my children's story at that moment it may have given them reason to doubt sharing things with me again. I did not tell them that they were mistaken in what they thought they saw but what I did tell them when they sat with me after dinner is some of the reasons why people think they see things which are not real and let them fit that rational into their own experience. The evidence of our senses cannot always be relied upon and that's often why people say 'there is more to this than meets the eye' or perhaps as Hamlet said, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy."

The reason some people believe in ghosts is not silliness on their part, in fact without some philosophical reasoning it's quite easy to see why people would believe in what they thought they saw. Take Occam's razor for example (A principle that generally recommends that, from among competing hypotheses, selecting the one that makes the fewest new assumptions usually provides the correct one, and that the simplest explanation will be the most plausible until evidence is presented to prove it false.) The simplest explanation here is that they both believed that they saw their Grandmother standing and looking at them and so they accepted it as such whereas the alternatives and good reasons for the mind playing tricks on them are both more complex and possibly beyond their present level of understanding.

Perhaps those of you who may for an instant consider our simpler ancestors may see that if we compile all of their collective simple ideas of believing 'what they think they saw' you will see a foundation upon which to build a twilight zone, a world of superstition.

Yet if we try to reason the ghosts is it not at once apparent that they are really more elaborate and complicated than our brains ability to play tricks on us? Explaining what happened as some kind of delusion only requires us to accept as true those phenomena which are well understood and within testable experience. We know our thoughts are sustained by our brains and when our brains (and we) die there is nothing (that we have found) that keep our thoughts alive. If on the other hand we accept as true that my Mother did appear before my children a couple of nights ago then what are these ghosts made of (you'll get minus points if you comment and mention 'ectoplasm') and why (other than clever photographic work) have we never been able to detect them?
Unexplainable stories like this and the ones you all undoubtedly know have a very strong allure on our imaginations, I love a good ghost story as much as most people but I know them to be just stories. The truth is that our memories and senses are not as infallible as we like to believe they are and we perhaps dismiss this from fear, a fear that we may be thought of as mad perhaps? I have no such fear because I already know I'm crazy (laughs)!

As Lewis Wolpert suggested in his book, six impossible things before breakfast, that one of the most fundamental features of human intelligence, the thing that allowed us to develop our mental capacities so far was an ability to attribute powers of cause and effect in the world around us. We need to do it to survive and we need to do it without rational proof or direct observation (much to the abhorrence of science) because a lot of it isn't available to us.
I press the switch on the wall and the light comes on. I do not see the direct cause of what causes the sudden luminance and simply because it happened many times before it is not logical to assume it will continue to do so each time I close the switch. The perceiving of causes is instinct, a habit and not something fundamentally rational and that means we are able to also see causes where there are none and we much prefer to have a bad casual explanation rather than nothing at all. We are beings that see hidden powers working everywhere when in reality the only powers at work are random events of physical chance.

I don't claim to understand everything even if I'd like to understand everything that at least came into my life and the lives of my family. I made a fairly reasonable account of why my children saw what they did and the circumstances surrounding that moment of Riko crying out to her grandmother.
I have given myself and them the rationalization of it and we all agree that it is most probably what happened. Sadly the alternative is that no matter how much they or I wish it, their grandmother cannot be here to witness my beautiful girls and tell them she loves them. The best and most comforting thought that I can offer myself is the fact that her and my genes live on in them and hopefully one day in their children. This then must be the truth of our immortality.
It's a huge and crazy world at times and I cannot explain all that I've encountered. My own ghosts from the past and that wonderful soothsayer who predicted this, my future happiness and other strange events remain mysteries and you know what? I don't even try to solve such things because if I were to analyze each and every thing I would pass over my own magic moments with a cold contempt. My magic moments are too precious to me and I truly am quite content to love a beautiful mystery. The magic in the love of my family and the hugs and smiles from my girls means more to me than knowing the chemical formula for it being so!

One old movie once told us that 'we ain't afraid of no ghost!'