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We pick up other spirits as we sail - my old mentor, a loving uncle, a neighbor suffering dementia, a pair of criminals looking to pull one last job. No relief."Īs she begins to work through it, we set sail back to her old haunts, her old home. "When he left with Doug, I didn't feel anything. "I've been thinking about Father recently," she tells me from her cabin on the ship, as the sound of waves plays in the background. But before she's ready to cross through the final threshold, Gwen has to first confront the painful struggles of her life.Īnd the pain takes me by surprise, pinching in my chest as I read her dialogue, relating to a rift in her family, which seems to be her unfinished business. In it, I am Gwen's friend Stella, come to ferry her soul through the afterlife. I'm playing a Nintendo Switch game, " Spiritfarer," released in August 2020. And then I found more ghosts, this time through a smaller screen.įrom a cozy seat on my couch, I watch my best friend Gwen, in the form of a beautiful animated deer, take a drag from a cigarette as she reminisces with me about our youth shared in Europe, before turning solemn as she considers unresolved feelings about her family. And in a year of widespread loss and grief en masse, I have struggled to feel like a good friend, a good partner, a good daughter. I've never learned to help people through their grief, or even to navigate my own.

I imagined the ghost of the old man peering back at me from the tent set up in the middle of the graveyard - now, too, burdened with the secrets I'd been unraveling.īut I can't help his ghost. Then curiosity got the best of me and I found myself down a 23&Me rabbit hole that ended with me staring at the livestream of a stranger's funeral, watching my dad's estranged father mourn his own. First were the family ghosts, the scenes and snippets of stories that I found at the edges of my memory, as isolation stretched on and the rooms of the house grew more and more dull.