Author: Joy Murray

I'm a 60 year old artist in Memphis, Tennessee. I spend my life trying to catch stories, give them form, color and light, then send back out into the world.

Story: Driving Home

Posted in ghost story, original fiction9 Comments
Driving Home 
A Story

by
Joy Murray

I never learned to drive because I’ve had health and mobility problems most of my life.  Part of my condition includes really bad fatigue, where I get so tired I can’t think straight.  I always told myself that if I went a whole year without experiencing that kind of fatigue, I’d learn.
I got an opportunity when I was about 43.  I was recently divorced and spending a year house-sitting for a good friend who was spending the year traveling.  She said I could use her car while she was gone.  She thought it was absurd that I never learned.
I hadn’t gone a full year without fatigue, but it’d been several months.  I had started a B-12 therapy, and was pretty energized.  I got a crash course in driving, got my license and was on the road on my own for the first time.  My whole world opened up.  Without long bus rides, I could go to work, go to the gym, go to a volunteer meeting, visit a friend, and get groceries all in the same day.  It was amazing.
And it was too much for me.  I was driving home one night after an exhausting day and I kept making mistakes.  I didn’t remember to use my turn signals.  I spaced out and veered into the next lane which brought on a blare of horns.  I was so nervous I was shaking.  I pulled over and parked at the first place I could find, stopped the car and rested my head on the steering wheel.  It took me a minute to realize where I was.  I was in a part of town I only knew from the news.  It was where all the gang warfare, murders and muggings happened.  I was in the parking lot of a row of seedy dance clubs.
If I could just rest for a minute, my head would clear and I could make the short drive home.  I couldn’t relax and I couldn’t get the sound of those car horns out of my ears.  I closed my eyes and tried to will some energy into my brain when I was startled by a knock on the window.  I looked up and saw my brother.
I rolled down the window.  “Oh, my God, I’m glad to see you.  How did you find me?”
He reached in, unlocked the door and put his hand on my shoulder.  It felt cold but soothing.
“What are you doing driving a car?”
I couldn’t explain, the words got stuck in my mouth.  “Friend gave me lessons… I can… It’s just… I mean today… the horns…I don’t know.”
“Come on,” he said, then helped me out of the driver’s seat, and escorted me around to the passenger side.  “Put on your seat belt.”
I obeyed.
He got back in and started the car. “You really aren’t meant to drive.  You’ve got a good life, but you’ve got to take it slow.”
“It’s just a bad day,” I said.
“It’s going to be a lot of bad days if you have a wreck.  You’re always trying to be something your not.  I can’t keep getting you out of trouble.”
I wanted to argue with him but couldn’t find the words, so I asked, “How’d you find me?”
“I had a gig over there and imagine my surprise to see you weaving your way off the road like some old drunk.”
“You had a gig?  They like your music over there?”
“Something like that.”
By then, he pulled into my driveway.  He turned to me and put his hand on my shoulder again.  “Really now.  Don’t drive any more.  It’s not for you.”
From where his cool hand touched me, I felt warmth spread all through my body and I got so tired, I fell asleep right there in the car.
When I woke up, the sun was peeking through the car windows. I was still in the passenger seat and the keys were in my lap.
I rushed into the house, called my sister and told her everything that happened.  I don’t think she believed me, but she came over in her car and picked me up.  We went to florist and bought a huge bright bouquet.  We spent the rest of the morning cleaning and decorating my brother’s grave.
***
Afterword:
I’ve always wondered why there weren’t more ghost stories where the ghosts were lovely to behold and helpful.  We get so macabre, and we glorify the evil dead — but I have to say I’ve never had any problem from monsters or ghosts.  It’s the humans that have been the evil bastards in my life  — although I have been blessed to know many saintly humans, too.  I hope you are blessed that way, too. 
Thanks for reading.  Let me know what you think.

Passages, Mourning and Halloween

Posted in death, grief, mourning, paranoia, schizophrenia, spirits, spirituality18 Comments


Sean At 18  We don’t have many pictures of him

 

Ever since my younger brother died in 2008, Halloween has been a difficult season for me.  We don’t know his exact death date.  He had schizophrenia and was often uncommunicative for weeks at a time.  His last call on his cell phone record was October 25th.  He wasn’t found until November 11th.  He was 44 years old.  He lived alone. Even though his family, especially my mother and older sister, tried very hard to help him out, he resisted and preferred a life of isolation.  We knew not to push him too hard to do anything.  At one point, he disappeared for about 13 years.  He resurfaced 4 years before his death.
He was very strong-minded for a man who heard paranoid voices in his head since he was a teenager. He worked as an electrician.  He went to work and went home.  He had a perception of himself as being very small and was always drinking protein powder and lifting weights.  I asked him one time if he ever wanted to socialize more.  “If I go straight home, I stay out of trouble.”
My brother was scary.  Even though he thought he was small, he was about 6’2” and built like a truck, broad and muscular.  He always wore several layers of clothes to cover up how small he thought he was.  He was quiet most of the time, but if you ever heard one of his episodes where he would start responding to the voices, start talking about how the people in the television were out to kill him and how one day he would get back at all the people who had hurt him, you would be more than justified at fearing him.
He had a very difficult childhood.  My father was abusive and both my parents were alcoholics.  But my brother had a enough self discipline to maintain a job without anyone thinking he was anything other than weird for being so quiet and never socializing.
We don’t know for sure what he died of.  He was sick with the flu and my sister took him medicine and begged him to go to a doctor, but he was paranoid of doctors.  When they found him, one of the men who collected his body called us and told us to go to the apartment before the hazardous-materials team got there.  My brother had left money strewn all around the apartment.  When he came home from work, he’d just throw his cash out of his pockets as if it were some kind of contaminant.
One of the main worries we had was how we were going to afford bury him.  We all were living from paycheck to paycheck.  My mom was on Social Security and getting less than $600 a month.
My two sisters and my brother-in-law and I found enough money in my brother’s apartment to cover the burial expenses.  It was such a sad sojourn, that act of hunting and gathering. We wore face masks.  He lived a spartan life.  Weights in the living room.  A mattress on the floor.  A table to eat at.  The smell of decay was sharp and thick.  We saw where he was died. We collected his few personal things and the money hidden everywhere.  There was enough to pay for the burial.
It was traumatizing, but it showed me how hard my brother worked to maintain a sense of sanity and to not bother anyone.  It  also ingrained in me a profound respect for the human body, for decay, for the passage we all make from physical matter to spiritual beings.
I mourned his death, but more so, I mourned his illness that isolated him so much. That is what haunts me.  Later we found out he had almost $80,000. in his bank account.  He never spent money outside of what he needed.  The money left was a gift to a family who he never really let close to him, but we would have much rather him have spent it on getting mental help.
Halloween used to be a favorite time, and I loved the whole macabre celebration.  Now I feel removed from it.  It’s a more sacred time and I don’t like seeing the glorification of insanity, wounds and zombies.
Each year since his death, though, I get a little more light-hearted about it. He has helped.  He visits me in my dreams.  When he was young he always played guitar and was quite good at it.  After he got ill, he wrote music with square notes and mathematical formulas that sounded very discordant.  In my dreams, he always has a guitar and is surrounded by melodies like bird songs.
Living around children helps me get through Halloween, too.  I give out candy.  Sometimes I wear a witch hat.  I still love jack-o-lanterns.  But I don’t think I’ll ever be able to go to a haunted house or participate in a zombie fest.  And sometimes seeing a particularly graphic costume will send me spiraling into grief.  But it isn’t always a costume that can set me to mourning.
I began to sink into depression over my brother a few days ago.  On the way home from the library, while I waited for the bus, a very dirty and skinny man came to wait with me.  He was muttering and talking to himself, gesturing and making pointed comments in some language of his own.  I began to think of the sorry state of mental health care in our abundant country and the terrible time we had trying to get help for my brother.
When I got home, I started drawing a face and I began a few hours of very passionate paint splattering and mourning.  I realized I was trying to draw my brother.  I’d been trying to do an homage to him since he died, but never could bring myself to it.

 

I started mourning in full, crying, drawing, erasing, crying, painting.  I got out almost all my art supplies and even my sand paper — putting on color, sanding it off.   I knew I’d gone a little off kilter, but it felt okay.  Sometimes madness is the only possible response.
Finally a face stared back at me.  With a subtle grin.  My brother emerged from all that chaos to say, I think, Lighten up.  And I did.
Autumn Visit
I told a friend about my brother’s death.  She is in her 30s and has 3 young children. She is celebrating the Day of the Dead in addition to Halloween.  She invited me to a Sugar Skull event on next Tuesday, and I felt like I could get through that.  I tried to remember a favorite food of my brother, but he really only ate to build up his body.  I will make a sugar skull for him anyway.
Today, I worked on the homage painting that has been in the back of my mind for the last 5 years.  Just a simple watercolor of him flying off to a saner, more sacred place.  I drew him with an Oud-like instrument, the first guitar invented.  There’s some gold glazing that doesn’t show up in the scan of the painting.
I know I will carry  love and confusion throughout my life.  Mourning is something we must do if we are to feel love and compassion.  If we are to keep our loved ones close in our hearts.
Soon, I’ll build a little altar for the Day of the Dead – for my brother, for my mother, for my grandmother, for all the souls that have struggled through this life and made it to the other side.  I pray they continue to haunt me, trouble and inspire me, until I join them in the great mystery beyond life.

What the Ocean Provides

Posted in art journal, beach, cruxifix, disability, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, journaling3 Comments

My husband Jim and I got to drive from Portland, Oregon, where we live, to the sea side town of Seaside. I took my trusty journal along.  Not only do I like writing and sketching by the ocean (and everywhere else), but it helps me cope with the fact that my mobility is so much more limited than it used to be.  I’ve had problems walking since I was sixteen, but since I turned fifty, 3 years ago, my joints and balance have deteriorated a bit more. 

Three years ago I felt pretty safe just using my cane at the shore, but now I need a walker to keep from falling.  My friend photographer Clyde Jones took this about four years ago.  I was getting along pretty well with my quad cane. 

Jim now brings camp chairs and we do tandem journaling and breathe the sea air.  I forgot my camera, so I did a lot of quick sketching.  When I sketched, I kept thinking of those nice polished visual journals that get posted on line.  I despair that my drawing will never be that good.  I like drawing birds and people and things that tend to move quickly, so I’m scribbling and trying to keep up.  But even when I draw a rock, some days, the drawing isn’t so great.

But that’s not why I keep my journal.  Even with bad drawing, it’s good memory.  And it keeps me from dwelling on the past.  If you want to live in the present, sketching is a very helpful tool.  The inner chatter stops.  If you do it long enough, even the inner critic (sometimes known as the itty bitty sh**ty committee) goes quiet.

At our first stop for sitting on the beach, a man and woman were building a cross.  The woman held pieces of drift wood together while the man tried to cut rope with a rock.  Jim was alarmed that she was leaning over to hold up the heavy wood and might throw her back out, so he offered the man his knife.  The man refused and said he only built crosses with things that God provided.  The woman said, “Maybe God provided him with the knife,” but the man kept working the rope on a the rock.  He had on designer looking sunglasses, a nice watch and a leather fanny pack.  “The Lord doesn’t usually provide such large pieces of rope.  I’ve built lots of these crosses and I always only use what we the Lord provides.”

So Jim sat back down next to me.  Eventually the woman let go of the driftwood til the man got t he rope sorted out.  He was singing praise songs.  And when he finished, he took a picture of the cross with a digital camera.

I drew it quickly and terribly, but the story is set in my mind and I captured details I wouldn’t have otherwise.  I also totally forgot about not being able to frolic at the water’s edge.  

Has your journal ever elevated your mood and helped you see the humor in humans?

Here’s some pages from yesterday — on thin sketchbook paper and painted later with cheap pan watercolors.  Not so very artful, but a delight to me nontheless.  And now I have a little bit of the ocean to carry with me all month.

 
 Thanks for looking.

The Tale She Spun Watercolor Painting

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I had a lot of spiders on my porch in August and September. Some of the kids in my neighborhood came by and we told stories, spinning new realities. I started thinking about how the tales we tell seem to spin out a life of their own. So this painting emerged from those thoughts. And of course, this is the season for celebrating spiders and our relationships with story, history, the here and the hereafter.

The background has words written in gold, bronze and silver metallic gel ink about spinning stories.
8.5 x 11″

Watercolor, ink and metallic gel pens on 100% cotton Stonehenge 125 lb paper. All archival acid free materials used.

This painting is for sale on Etsy for $40.  This painting sold but you can check my etsy shop for more orinal pieces.
 
https://www.etsy.com/listing/164540951/the-tale-she-spun-watercolor-painting?ref=shop_home_active

Thanks for looking!