I Am A Haunted House

We talk so much about representation in media these days. We want the solidarity and acceptance of what we look like, what we live with, who we are. We make songs, movies, books, and art that become echoes of love lost; we shape them into hauntingly beautiful moments and set them up as monuments to memory that lingers. Because beneath the longing to be special and unique, we crave a sense of similarity that might make us feel less alone.

As a kid, I loved horror movies, hauntings, and scary stories. Maybe the extremity of those things made my life seem more normal somehow—when everyday life looks like a nightmare, Freddy Kreuger is as comforting as he is scary, and if you live in an environment that feels like The Shining's Overlook Hotel, you see just as much home as horror. Even when life got better, I loved stories about abandonment, grief and redemption, complicated family relationships, trauma recovery, and ghosts.

I loved hauntings. They can be sad or scary, sure, but they also hover right on the edge of what makes remembrance beautiful. To be haunted by the past means those moments of connection and emotion were real enough to leave a mark. The ghosts of memory, left behind like the glue that remains long after a stubborn label is removed.

And maybe in our own ways, we're all haunted. Healing from ghosts of the past, hoping forgiveness and grace will soften the moments and memories that echo in the halls of our hearts.

This October, with the focus on domestic violence awareness and the value of healing after childhood trauma, the ghost haunting me most often is my father.

He wasn’t perfect. He was proud. Spiteful. Angry. My earliest memory is one of silent dissociation—myself as a four-year-old girl, dressed in a nightgown, frozen in the living room doorway, big blue eyes slowly absorbing destruction. No sound, no smell. Just the sparkle of shattered glass scattered like diamonds, and the stillness of knife-gouged couch cushions bleeding shredded foam.

Sometimes I think of who he was in his darkest moments and I see something twisted by evil. Gollum, captivated by the Ring. But that’s not all he was—and while I can't ignore the haunting truth of the man he became, there is still a powerful light of legacy and faith that shine through glimpses of the man he wanted to be.

He was always angry before church, red-faced and ranting as he struggled to get everyone in the car on time. I hated the fear that filled me, the cruelly condescending things he would say. But in the sanctuary of the church building itself, he was the best of what he might have been. Smiling and joking with the pastor. Tall and proud as he adjusted his shoulders when we stood between the pews to sing. He wasn't faking one side or the other...he was both extremes.

He was pain and insecurity carefully shielded by pride. Bitterness rotting under the armor of rage. Rejection, wielding good natured-humor like a weapon that might win acceptance. Above all these things, or maybe because of them, he was simply human.

On Sunday mornings I stood proudly at his right hand, wrapped in the rich, deep baritone of his voice, the scratchy sleeve of his suit coat warm against my arm as he balanced the hymnal between us. I read music in the rise and fall of his voice, taking the words as much from his song as from the book we shared.

And I wore my connection to him like a shining badge pinned to the fabric of my heart. He was a fearsome man who feared nothing. A strong man who never backed down, an impenetrable fortress who commanded respect.

The first time I saw him cry was in church. Blanketed by the sheer size of his presence, my own chest vibrating with the strength of his voice, I looked up from the hymnal and found him singing through tears—dark eyelashes and coarse cheeks shining with moisture, chin trembling, voice unwavering.

And if the God they talked about could find and touch a soft spot in my father...if he could rip public grief from the privacy of the strongest Daddy who ever lived...if he could find a hurting place in an untouchable man and make tears bleed from unseen wounds...

Then it was real. It had to be. Because only the supernatural strength of God could move a man like my father to such a state.

This weekend, nearly thirty years later, my oldest daughter and I stood as guests in a little church not our own. The pews were old-fashioned, lined with the hymnals of my childhood. And when the congregation rose to sing, I opened the hymnal, flipped easily to the right page, and tipped the book to share with my daughter.

And for a moment he was there between us. My father. His voice as strong and true as always, his presence as large as life, the echo of his hand holding the pages. Remnants of his existence, present in me as I sang through tears.

It felt like a holy haunting—a reminder that faith and healing walk together, proof that learning to forgive an imperfect parent is worth it, and hope in the promise that grief is not the end of the story.

*****

My father was a hard man, and for a long time, I wrestled with my memory of him. What he lived through, the experiences that made him who he was, the parts of him that hardened me.

As his child, I grieve the father he could have been but chose not to be. As an adult, I understand how pain can twist love into a horrifying caricature. And as a mother now to daughters of my own, I carry both the wound and the warning—with a desperate prayer that my children will inherit more healing than hurt.

My father taught me that love and pain are rarely separate things. But as time and maturity have softened both rage and resentment, I've also come to realize that sometimes the people who hurt us the most become our greatest teachers in healing. Whether he meant to or not, the legacy my father left me is this: it's okay to see a river of pain, call it what it is, and then build a dam.

Maybe that’s what grace really is—the kind of haunting that quietly turns old pain into new peace. The reminder that one person's regret can lead to another's redemption.

And maybe that’s why, as I edit the pages of Still Fighting for Freedom, I find traces of him between the lines, in humor and strength and stubborn resilience. Christine was written largely for my mother, but I think my dad would recognize himself in her too, even if he'd never say it out loud.

I like to think he'd proud, not only of Christine, but of me—even if he'd never say that out loud either. Because hope, like faith or music or memory, never really leaves us. It simply shifts with the passing of time, teaching us lesson by lesson how to...

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