By 
About two months ago, when I first walked through the front door of the house that I now quite naturally call home, ‘the potential’, as they say on those property renovation programmes, didn’t knock me off my feet. If anything, an acrid, overpowering smell of urine did.
The lady who lived here before the house became ‘available’ had been ill for a while before she passed away.
I don’t know a lot about her, but I know that much.
I also know that she loved dogs.
Before she died, she had at least four or five, though one neighbour, keen to find out from the carpet cleaner just how big of a job he had on his hands, speculated she had as many as six.
These two facts – that she loved dogs and that she was not one of the lucky ones who get the privilege of dying old and sudden – were there the first day I stepped through the door.
But I was too busy imagining my future to take a second to think about her past.
All I saw were stained carpets to be torn up, dirty walls to be painted, floors that might be salvageable but might not. We’d get a cleaner in to have a go, and if that didn’t work, we’d rip them up too.
We were gutting the place. Everything had to go. A ruthless red-out.
But as we made our way from one cupboard to the next, unceremoniously chucking away all her stuff, from cookware, to cutlery, to wee bits of tat she’d gathered over the years, the cumulative effect began to sit uneasily inside me.
This wasn’t a home makeover, or even a clearance; it was an exorcism.
I mentioned this to my partner Niamh – that it was starting to feel a bit callous, that there we were, about to move into somebody else’s home, somewhere that they had spent a big part of their life, and we were effectively expunging every trace of her from the place.
“I’m not saying we have to turn the house into a shrine, but we don’t have to throw everything out just because it belonged to her. If there is stuff that we could actually use ourselves, why don’t we keep it?” I suggested, to which Niamh agreed.
Niamh’s mother, however, did not get this memo.
One day I came down to the house, went into the utility room and found that about 100 reusable shopping bags – which, oddly, to me had become the central symbol of how we would respect this woman’s memory by reusing some of her stuff – were, to the very last one, gone.
Fuming, but trying my best to keep my cool, I asked where the bags had gone.
Tina, who had kindly come down to help us paint, turned around, put down her brush, and apologetically admitted that she’d binned them all.
About 15 minutes later, when the red mist had ascended, I was the one apologising to Tina.
Since then, the place has started to feel more like ours, and that niggling sense that we have a duty to afford the lady who lived here before us her dignity in death is not as strong.
In fact, just living here, treating the place well and focusing on being happy ourselves now somehow seems like the best way to respect her.
It’s not that I think she’s looking down on us. It’s not even that I think the neighbours are looking over at us. It’s just that place and people are so closely connected that it seems right to remember and to show some respect.
If ghosts are real, that’s what they are: The relationship between people, place and time – the echoes of lives lived before ours, and whether we choose to hear them or not.
