Visiting Dis

Currently Reading: Aeneid Book VI

....Which happens to be where Aeneas visits the Underworld. Told by the Sibyll that the door to Dis is always open--anyone can go there, whenever they want!--Aeneas finds that the problem, as always, is getting back out again.

Sometimes Dis visits us, though. Repeatedly. My grandmother passed away in January...but I've had several messages from her since then. Some more literal than others.

The spookiest was her voice, which kept mysteriously popping up on our answering machine even a month after she'd died. We'd hit the "new messages" button, and there was my grandmother, her voice recorded in some sort of background conversation with my father.

It was the creepiest thing ever--the kind of moment where all the little hairs on your head rise straight up.

But this moment, as all moments, had its explanation. We'd all participated in the sad task of going through Grandma's stuff after she died; little things, like recipe boxes, TV sets, and sewing machines, all had to find their new homes. We took home Grandma's phone. And we'd plugged it into a back bedroom somewhere and forgot about it, little suspecting that this wasn't just ANY phone.

This phone had a fancy recorder and message machine attached to it, and somewhere along the line, Grandma had recorded her own conversation with my dad as they tried to figure out how to make the thing work. That conversation somehow remained on the machine. And every time our answering machine picked up, hers would as well; but ours would override hers, and what would happen is that that strange conversation would get recorded onto our messages. So we heard it again, and again, and again.

We figured it out, obviously. And then I had the second oddly sad decision to make: do you erase the voice of your deceased loved one? Even she IS haunting your message machine ever day?