What haunts me?

By JoAnne Young

I have a lot of things haunting me these days. My own personal thoughts and worries are part of the list, and like many of you, there are the collective hauntings that are hanging on to us thanks to a recent election and subsequent deeds and misdeeds that have resulted from it. 
 
Hauntings are those things that snuggle in with me at night, waiting for me to become conscious for just a minute so they can call my resting brain to action. Or thoughts and memories that come to mind when I’m driving across town and letting my brain free float. 
 
Our ghosts live inside us, says writer Sue William Silverman in her Acetylene Torch Songs. Bringing them out of our heads, writing about the things that inhabit us can be a way to make sense of them, to bury them or even resurrect them. 
 
Here’s one. I see people on Facebook post pictures and remembrances of their mothers who are no longer with them. They say they think of them every day, they pine over how much they miss them.  It haunts me that my relationship with my mother was complicated, that I can’t mourn her online the way others can theirs. I think about her frequently. She even shows up a lot in my dreams in odd supporting roles in strange shadowy scenes. What she says, what she does, is vague. I just know she had a presence there. 
 
The ocean haunts me. I spent my first six years wading in the Atlantic Ocean nearby my first home in Savannah, Georgia. In fifth grade the Mississippi gulf coast was my playground. I have stood in crashing waves on the coasts of California and Oregon, peered into their tide pools and bent low to look at their pink or green sea stars. The last place I saw my sister alive was on the South Carolina shoreline of Myrtle Beach, and on the morning she died 10 little star fish cast themselves on the beach in a farewell gesture. 
 
And yet, I spend my decades here, far away from every sea. Maybe the ocean doesn’t haunt me. Maybe it’s my landlocked condition. 
 
Sometimes it tugs at my soul a little that I didn’t choose a career in medicine all those years ago. I absolutely don’t regret my decades-long journalism career. I was always able to convince myself I was doing some good by giving people accurate information about what was going on in our city and state, and by telling people’s stories, no matter how important or how small the circle of impact. But several times during those years I would back up and spend time gathering information on returning to school to become a health provider. My mother was a nurse. I grew up sitting on the floor of her room reading the nursing journals that were stacked under her bed. So I’ll always wonder.
 
It frequently nags at me that I live in a red state, and that my statewide vote always gets slapped around by the three-fourths of the state and vast majority of the counties that make up Congressional District 3. We could spend all our nights fretting over the world’s-on-fire situation in our nation’s capital. But right now, I also see a big mess closer to home, like less than four miles away from me at the Nebraska State Capitol. 
 
It’s there that a majority of our elected representatives in the Legislature have done us – we the people – wrong. They have forgotten we are the Second House, that they were sent to Lincoln to carry out what is best for Nebraskans, not just for a tight group that believes like they do. Not just people who attend their church. Not just parents who send their kids to a private school. Not just the business their family owns. 
 
* They have twisted the rules of our one house and ignored the 75% of people who said working Nebraskans are entitled to paid sick leave, even those who work in small businesses. 
* After dragging their feet on establishing a working plan for medical marijuana, approved by 71% of voters, they have finally consented to debate an amended bill so it can be enacted. 
* They have vowed to keep introducing more bills aimed at moving public money to private schools after voters rejected a school voucher law. 
* And they are attempting to change the minimum wage agreement voters approved in 2022. 
 
I used to call these manipulations by state senators shenanigans. It’s gone way beyond that for me. It’s just an insult to voters in the state who signed petitions and went to the polls to say what they want for Nebraska, only to have a small number of arrogant men and women say: We don’t care what the majority of Nebraskans want, and we’re going to misuse our power to invalidate theirs.
 
So there’s a few of the haunting melodies I hear in my head. And now I’ve brought out these ghostly images and ideas and transformed them to achieve some resolution. 
 
I feel better. 
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