One summer when I was a child, my parents rented an old beach house. My sister and I believed it was haunted: objects moved when we weren’t looking, and at night we would see shimmers out of the corners of our eyes. We told our parents, but they didn’t believe us.
Our grandmother did. She often talked to the ghosts of the people she had loved. My sister thought it was silly and made fun of our grandmother behind her back, but I realized that she was more sentimental than superstitious. She had lost so many people close to her, and it gave her comfort to speak to them. Her mother had died when she was a little girl, and her brother had died in middle age. She had also outlived three husbands.
