Death of a Ghost Hunter

There was one Halloween season when I just knew I was going to die. Oddly enough, when it happened, my death still surprised me.

The doctor diagnosed me with COPD the previous spring, when I was only 43. I'd gone to the doctor because of mysterious episodes of shortness of breath for no reason. I'd start gasping for air, sweating, heart pounding. It had been happening for about a year with more and more frequency, and I knew I couldn't ignore it any longer.

The kicker was, that once it was said and done; test results were in, COPD winner was announced and it was me...

But alas, I could not afford the type of inhaler I needed. Luckily, Doc thought I was in the "early stages" of whatever all this was, so in other words, I probably had lots of time left to implement my treatment plan of being very careful and hoping I didn't drop dead!

It's a fucked up thing when you find out you're sick, and you can't afford to get better. Not only for you, the sick person, but also for the people around you. I had a husband, a 17-year-old son, and a 13-year-old daughter. I could sense an underlying concern, because of little things like sleeping in the middle of the day and waking to find that my son was hugging me, or my daughter politely asking me to not make darkly funny jokes about death in my current condition... But, mostly it was as if they were pretending nothing was wrong with me. I did it too most of the time. We all somewhat existed in this silently agreed upon pact where everything would carry on as usual, nothing was wrong in our world, and we'd all just pretend that Mom wasn't gasping for air and almost having a heart attack just by carrying a laundry basket across the room.

But it got so much worse over the summer and fall leading up to that Halloween season. It had gotten to where even at rest; I was breathing hard. My chest felt heavy and like something dark was living within the rattling bones of my rib cage. I sucked air in and out with a wheeze that sounded as though my lungs were old black tires that had sprung the tiniest of leaks and weren't holding air.

I thought that there was no way I was going to make it to old age. No way. Certainly at age 43, I wouldn't go through further decades, gasping for breath and with thunder in my heart. Certainly this wasn't really going to get worse and worse sprawling out over the span of many breathless years? Certainly at the rapid rate that I was losing my ability to get air into my lungs or to push it out, I would not have long to live.

Then I thought I wouldn't even be around for the following school year.

Next, I started to ponder if I'd even make it to Christmas.

The day that I did die, October 1st, was the sort of day I would have once loved before my world had become dark and uneasy. Fall had fully strolled the streets of our small town and lined them with every glorious hue of yellow, orange, and red. The stately trees dropped their leaves along the cobblestone sidewalks. By the time I took my kids the short drive across town to school, a sumptuous gloom had rolled across the sky and the wind had a bite to it.

I entered the drop-off line where I first deposited my son at the high school. Beck Arden, seventeen-year-old with a constant stream of music pumping directly into his head through ear buds. Not the usual teen though, as he never forgot when hurrying to exit the car, to throw that quick but distinct, "Love you, Mom," over his shoulder. He did that day, and I felt a strange pang in my heart as I watched him hustle into the school.

The car inched along the busy line clear around to the second building, the middle school. Brianna Arden and I liked to spend that time being silly. Jokes, good natured arguing over what music was good and what wasn't, discussion of plans for the day. That morning we discussed whether Keanu Reeves was married. Brianna cared enough about the discussion to Google it. He's not.