My grandmother looked past me today, her gaze fixed on the far corner of the room. “Do you see the little boy?” she asked, her voice soft but assured. There was no little boy in the physical sense, yet the certainty with which she named him carried a kind of gravity I could not dismiss. Later she asked my brother about the little girl, and the night before she told my mother she had seen her older sister, the one who died in 2001, standing quietly at her bedside. These moments, though bewildering at first, began to feel less like confusion and more like glimpses into a space where memory and presence were becoming indistinguishable.
As I sat with her, I found myself thinking of Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas Past, that strange, luminous figure who appears to Scrooge “like a child: yet not so like a child as like an old man,” a presence both near and receding. The Spirit embodies the very quality I was witnessing: memory taking on form, time becoming fluid, old relationships and long-buried feelings emerging into the light. In Sol Eytinge’s engraving A Retrospect, the Ghost stands behind Scrooge, pointing into the darkness not with authority but with a gentle, illuminating insistence. It is memory as guide rather than judge. Sitting beside Grandma, I felt the same sense of soft revelation, as though the past itself had stepped forward with a lantern.
Her sister’s appearance seemed to confirm this sense that something more than random neural fire was unfolding. Grandma was one of more than a dozen siblings raised in rural Missouri. It was a world of chores and crowded bedrooms, hand-me-down dresses, and unspoken loyalty. Amid this lively constellation of brothers and sisters, one relationship carried special meaning: the older sister she went to live with when she first left Miller to work in Carthage. I imagine her stepping off that bus—young, nervous, determined—and finding shelter in her sister’s care. Years later, when that same sister suffered a stroke and became disabled, Grandma visited her daily in the nursing home, tending to her needs with the kind of devotion that is more lived than spoken. In this sense, her sister’s presence now feels less like a hallucination and more like a final gesture of reciprocity. The one who sheltered her early in life returns to shelter her now, a quiet echo of Dickens’s Fan embracing Scrooge with “Dear, dear brother!” That greeting carries the same tender recognition I imagine Grandma is experiencing.
Yet even more revealing than her sister’s appearance are the children who populate the edges of her awareness. The little boy. The little girl. They come and go like figures stepping out of lamplight, patient and unthreatening. Their presence makes a kind of profound symbolic sense. My grandmother spent more than forty years teaching Sunday school, guiding generation after generation of children through stories, crafts, songs, and lessons that were as much about kindness as they were about Scripture. She cared for the children of friends, treating them with the same affection she showed her own family. And she cared for me and my brother with a tenderness that settled into the very marrow of our childhoods. Caregiving was not an activity for her, it was a way of being.
As I reflected on this, Dickens’s scene with Fezziwig came to mind, when the Ghost suggests that Fezziwig’s generosity is a small matter. Scrooge objects: “The happiness he gives is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.” My grandmother lived that same moral arithmetic. Her influence came not from grand gestures but from countless small ones: steady, gentle, and reliable. The children she sees now are not random remnants of brain chemistry; they are emissaries of her vocation, embodiments of the tender work that defined her life just as surely as the many cookies she baked and gave away.
Thinking about these visions led me further into the phenomenology of dying itself. As the body weakens and metabolic processes shift, the mind often loosens its attachment to linear time. Memories are no longer sorted in chronological drawers but rise according to emotional significance. Loved ones who formed the early architecture of identity often appear first; the figures who shaped a person’s deepest expressions of love come next. Philosophers call this threshold consciousness: a state in which perception becomes symbolic, relational, and meaning-driven rather than literal. Dickens captures this beautifully through the Ghost’s glowing forehead: “a bright clear jet of light, by which all this was visible.” Not the light of reason, but the illumination of inner truth.
Returning to the bedside with this understanding, I began to recognize the coherence in my grandmother’s visions. Her sister comes from her beginnings, the children from her middle years, and the family gathered around her now from her final chapter. Rather than unraveling, she is gathering her life into a single field of meaning. The figures appearing to her are not fragments. They are the essential threads of her story rising to meet her. Dickens’s reminder that the scenes shown to Scrooge “are but shadows of the things that have been” feels apt here. These shadows, these memories made visible, do not diminish her. They reveal her.
This recognition brings me unexpected comfort. My grandmother is not being pulled into darkness; she is being accompanied by the very relationships that shaped her life. The sister who sheltered her when she was young returns in her moment of vulnerability. The children she taught for decades gather like small lanterns around her consciousness, embodying the love she poured into so many. And the family she raised and tended in her final years sits beside her, bearing witness.
Her past is not haunting her. It is guiding her.
It stands behind her like Eytinge’s Spirit, pointing gently toward the illuminated landscape of her own life.
She is walking toward a light she spent a lifetime creating, a light made from every act of care, every whispered prayer in a Sunday school room, every unseen and unknown kindness that rippled outward from her steady hands.
And as I sit with her, as she looks into corners where I see only air, I understand that she is not alone. She is accompanied by memory, by love, by the bright clear jet of light that belongs to those who have lived lives of quiet devotion. She is being led home by the very stories she helped shape.
And in the warmth of that light, we both find comfort.