In late October, the light grows dimmer and dimmer, as if to nudge us to turn inward against the backdrop of gray mornings, misty and wistful. On days like these, some people like to get cozy with a pumpkin spice latte and a nostalgic movie. I like to listen to music that will emotionally wreck me and ruin the rest of my day.
Here we meet Sufjan Stevens.
Some albums were just made for the fall, and for me that autumn album is Stevens’s Carrie & Lowell, a collection of songs about his private grief after the death of his mother. The album’s moody acoustic sound lends itself to the many small deaths that accompany the changing of seasons.
Stevens has been writing ambitious and poetic songs of grief and longing since the early 2000s, and his catalog is marked by an undeniable spirituality, along with a horde of biblical imagery that makes him a favorite among a certain kind of Christian listener. He also tells stories of his turbulent upbringing, which included maternal abandonment and mental health struggles. Last year, on the ten-year anniversary of Carrie & Lowell, he told NPR that grief “becomes a ghost that you have to learn to live with. It’s haunting, and it’s overwhelming at times. And I think it’s best to acknowledge it and receive it and welcome it, and give it the time and space that it needs.”
I lean on Stevens’s music to hold my own fragile moments and personal bereavement. In the midst of my parents’ divorce, I spent hours listening to his songs while weaving on a loom and watching the leaves turn outside the big windows on my college campus. In “Death with Dignity,” he sings, “But every road leads to an end. . . . / Your apparition passes through me in the willows. / And five red hens / —you’ll never see us again. / You’ll never see us again.” There was something beautifully brutal about working out these delicate feelings while creating an intricate piece of art with my hands. Meanwhile, the earth around me continued to descend into decay.
In “Enchanting Ghost,” from his 2010 album All Delighted People, Stevens sings: “Somewhere there’s a room for each of us to grow. / And if it pleases you to leave me, just go. / Stopping you would stifle your enchanting ghost.”
There are many kinds of losses we experience in relationships, losses of identity in ourselves and the people we fall in love with. In relationship with one another, we are often caught up with nostalgia for what we can’t let go of and for the ways things might have been: “I still have the things you gave me: / Four anointing oils, the paperweight you made. / For sure I haven’t carried them / Or buried them in the name of your ghost, my friend.” Older versions of ourselves linger like ghosts, like unmet expectations.
But belief in ghosts is often seen as not very Christian. Many of us are taught that after death, our spirits depart our physical bodies and go on to face judgement. Our spirits do not and cannot float among us as disembodied, glowy specters with some loose ends to tie up.
Christians once called the third member of the Trinity the Holy Ghost instead of the Holy Spirit. Ghost is from the Old English gast, which describes one’s breath, soul, and spirit. As language evolved, the word took on the meaning we understand today, and many biblical translations shifted primarily to spirit. In the Hebrew Bible, ruach describes the wind, the spirit of God, and the unmistakable creative spirit that God has given to humanity. Here we find a link to what Stevens is likely getting at when referring to his partner as a ghost.
For some of us, a belief in ghosts isn’t so much about an apparition that haunts the hallways. Instead, it’s the way someone who is absent remains inextricably part of your life. The person who was known so intimately is no longer here, but the memories of them and the shadows of what they brought into the world linger. Forgetting feels impossible. Carrying this kind of ghost with you is the only way forward.
“Genuflecting Ghost,” from Stevens’s 2023 album Javelin, mourns the death of his longtime partner, Evans Richardson: “Give myself as a sacrifice. / Genuflecting ghost, I kiss the floor. / Rise, my love, show me paradise. / Nothing seems so simple anymore.”
It isn’t clear here if Stevens is speaking to Richardson or perhaps to a being who accompanies them both in a thin place, where Stevens can no longer hold on as death creeps in and makes his lover intangible. Either way, it seems like Stevens is offering a kind of pleading reverence toward the figure, whom he greets with kindness, recognizing its presence as temporary, fleeting. “Genuflecting Ghost” is a prayer. A delicate hush hovers atop the lyrics, a small chorus of voices singing, “Rest assured, empires will fall, / Insecure, restless, and small. / Sacred word, bind me, insult / As I praise your name.”
Despite his losses, Stevens conveys hopefulness when he sings, “Now we dance in our catastrophe, / Ramparts in the sky that flash with horror. / Let’s take these chances, no more amnesty. / Nothing else remains as once before.”
Stevens’s ghosts speak to the shortcomings in our relationships, the times when we feel like we aren’t enough or we know we don’t have enough time at all—we too will be ghosts soon enough. But we can learn from the way he blurs the edges of his loves, his devotions, and pain points when, in our own lives, we have to grapple with ghosts who are welcome in memory and those who aren’t. Sometimes we wrestle with them. Sometimes we dance.
