A few years ago I left a job that I had held for a long time. It was time to move on (and, if I’m being honest, it had been for some time), but on my last day I found myself wandering the halls, revisiting every nook and cranny. It was a strange feeling, to know somewhere so well but no longer be a part of it. It felt, I imagined, how a ghost must feel gliding through the halls of what used to be their home.
I wouldn’t say that I believe in ghosts (the Catholic Church has no official teaching on the subject, for the record, although you can draw your own conclusions from what we teach about life and death), but I resonate with ghost stories. All of them are, to one degree or another, about how difficult it is for us to let go of things, even after they’re over. Those stories speak to how deeply we love, but also to a desire to prolong our lives however we can. Look at our obsession with legacy, our attempts to leave something behind. It’s a very human desire: finite creatures rebelling against our own finitude. But our faith teaches us that life’s limitations give it meaning. To embrace life’s full purpose, we need to be willing to let it go.
In “A Ghost Story” (2017), written and directed by David Lowery, we meet a young couple, credited only as C (Casey Affleck) and M (Rooney Mara), living in a ranch home. They’re in love, but also fighting, and on the cusp of moving. Then, C is killed in a car accident mere feet from their driveway. At the morgue, he rises from the table—now covered in a white sheet with two black, oblong eyes—and returns to his house. There he watches, invisible, as life moves on without him.
And that, essentially, is the rest of the film. C never again leaves the plot of land that was once his home. As a ghost he is unmoored from time, able to drift into the future and past. He sees the futuristic city that eventually devours his neighborhood, and the pioneer family who first staked a claim on the land. Occasionally he can interact with the living world in small ways: flickering lights, lifting objects. At one point, in a fit of rage and despair, he tears every plate from a cupboard and smashes them on the floor in front of a petrified family. But he can’t make any real connections, can’t change anything. The time for that has passed.
Ghosts represent a breach of the cycle of life and death, a clinging to earthly existence after our time has ended. In many stories ghosts are shackled to the living world by unfinished business. But we all die with unfinished business: death doesn’t wait patiently until we’ve checked off every item on our to-do list. We get as much time as we get, and that’s it; our lives, by their nature, are incomplete. As people of faith we believe that it’s the life after this one where we find ultimate resolution.
At one point in “A Ghost Story,” C watches as new tenants of the house throw a party. In the film’s longest spoken section, a drunken man (played by singer-songwriter Will Oldham) waxes philosophically about how all things will eventually pass away, ranging from the short span of each human life to the heat death of the universe. He talks in circles but his essential point is: Do what you want to do in life, create what you want to create, but if you’re doing so to create an eternal legacy for yourself you’re doomed to fail.
The kitchen-table philosopher is an atheist, but parts of his monologue resonate with our beliefs. Take, for example, Jesus’ parable of “the rich fool:” a man who spends his life hoarding earthly goods instead of pursuing good works and spiritual growth, leaving him unprepared when his life ends abruptly (Lk 12:16-21). We spend so much time planning for an earthly future, when none is promised to us; where, then, should our priorities lie? It’s as Jesus tells his disciples: “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Mt 16:25).
Eventually, C’s temporal meanderings take him back through his own life in the house. Standing apart, he sees how his inability to let go hurt his relationship with M. Even though his life is over, maybe there’s still time for him to learn from his experiences. Earlier in the film, a door of white light opens before C, but he rejects it to haunt his old home. We never see what lies on the other side of that door; in death, as in life, the future is mysterious. We can only move on when we learn to let go.
“A Ghost Story” is streaming on Max.
