Haunted

“I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him”

— Edgar Allan Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart

I’ve encountered many ghosts in my life. Not all of them friendly. Not all of them dead.

My father is dead in every way except the physical.

His heart still beats. His lungs still fill with air. He moves through his days beneath the same sun as I do. The man lives. The father does not.

I killed him.

For years, I carried him like a diseased limb—attached to me no matter how much it hurt. Every attempt to reshape me into his ideal felt like another infection. Every act of withdrawal pushed the pain deeper beneath the skin. I kept waiting for it to heal, for the disease to subside.

Instead, it spread.

So I did what you do when something is no longer survivable. I stopped pretending it could be saved—I amputated the limb. I cut into myself and removed the part that had been carrying the disease. This was not an act of violence; it was the recognition of a loss that had been unfolding slowly, long before I was willing to admit it. 

It left scars. Some days, I still reach for what is no longer there, forgetting for a moment that it is gone. Some days I feel the absence as sharply as the wound.

But the limb is gone.

And what I lost, I no longer carry.

I buried it, buried him, not in the ground. Not in a coffin. I buried him in the darkness of myself. I thought I would mourn the loss, carry it with me, but it made no difference—because what I buried never truly existed.

Only the ghost of a man remained, and I had already been living inside his silence. 

My father had often withheld his voice when he was displeased with me. In the last two decades, it had become little more than a whisper, as though his displeasure had shifted from my actions to my existence itself. I would listen to him speak to everyone except me, reprimanding me only with silence, never words. Over the years, silence became easier for him than presence, and as I grew older, it stopped feeling like distance and started feeling like disappearance.

He was slowly becoming a ghost.

I have known ghosts before. Some are versions of my past selves, guiding me forward. Others are ancestors, accompanying and supporting me from across the veil. But my father is a different kind of ghost. He haunts me. And like most hauntings, there was a time of becoming.

When I was one year old, he left for a month. When he returned, I would not let him hold me. A stranger had entered my life and expected to be called father. I cried because my body had already learned what my mind was too young to understand: he was a stranger. 

As the years passed, leaving became less an exception than a rhythm. He would disappear, return, and disappear again. With each absence, I learned to live without him; with each return, he seemed to expect life to resume where he had abandoned it. 

When I was twenty, he left again—this time for nearly a year. He returned to an independent young woman. One who no longer looked to him for answers. As I began to think for myself, choose for myself, exist without asking permission, something between us widened. Not because I moved away, but because I no longer required direction. 

His first absence taught my body not to know him. Every subsequent absence taught my heart not to look for him.

For a time, I believed I had caused the fracture—that my becoming was our failure. But now I do not see it that way. What held us together was not connection, but dependence.

What does it mean—what does it become—when a relationship interprets growth as a threat?

My father infantilized me, manipulated me, kept me small to preserve his own value, rather than building it through love or connection. He chose dependence. But I did not rely on him; his absence made him unreliable by design. So I grew stronger, as he grew weaker.

It felt less like a death than a haunting: a presence already in the process of unmaking itself. He was translucent; I reached for him, and my hand passed through what remained, into the void beyond him. 

There is a strange gentleness that can come just before an ending: the moment I killed him was not marked by cruelty, but by a quiet acceptance of who he is, and more importantly, of who I am.

I released the ghost—I stopped reaching for a father who could not reach back. And in that moment, when I released the tortured soul from my heart, I found a semblance of peace. 

There are nights when the absence behaves like breath—quiet, steady, almost patient—like something learning how to exist in torment.

And in those moments, I understand what hauntings really are: not the return of the dead, but the persistence of what was never allowed to finish becoming.

If peace exists for him, I hope he finds it. 

Rest in peace, Father.

Work Cited

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Tell-Tale Heart. Canterbury Classics, 2011.