No more Little Miss Nice Ghost

Chapter One 

The upside to dying is that I will never again hear the phrase “all of our agents are currently busy.” Let’s be honest, if you’ve been experiencing a higher-than-normal call volume at work for more than six months, that’s not actually higher, that’s your new normal. Hire more people.

But none of that is my problem anymore.

The nice thing about life (and death) in Canada is you can opt out whenever you want. Or whenever the cancer wins. Officially it’s called Medical Assistance in Dying, or MAID. You sign some paperwork, wait the mandatory reflection period for liability reasons, then close your eyes, relax, and boom. It’s over. Easy peasy.

Or it was supposed to be easy peasy.

I planned to die on Tuesday. I had everything prepared, even the goodbye message.

“Hey, Sparks,” I say, trying not to squint at the ring light while my phone silently records. “If you’ve been following me the last few weeks, you’ll know that this is probably going to be my last message. I know this is uncomfortable. Cancer sucks. No one wants to talk about it, so I’ll try to keep this short . . .”

The flickers of reaction emojis pour over the screen as I say farewell to the community I’ve spent the last six years building. People think it’s silly. That followers aren’t the same as friends. But I’ve made some amazing connections and learned from everyone. In the end, it’s important to give relationships closure, even virtual ones.

Okay. Moving on. Dying is easy. My family—parents and siblings; we decided my little nieces and nephews are too young to be here—have gathered. Soft music plays. My eyelids get heavy, and at the last second, I hear the gentle sound of a snore rattling at the back of my throat. Then there’s nothing. Or at least, nothing more.

I crack open one eye to find the same overhead bulb that was there a minute ago. Where is my white light? My clouds of angels playing the harps and welcoming me to a better place? I was hoping my grandparents might be waiting for me. Or at least Teddy and Bear, the family cats who died when I was in high school. They should be waiting at the gates of heaven, just like they used to wait at the front door, ready to scream their protests that they hadn’t been fed ever. Not once in their entire feline lives. Never mind that Teddy was the size of a corgi and Bear had single-handedly decimated the squirrel population in our Don Mills neighbourhood. Even in life after death, they would believe they were starving.

But I’m still in the hospital room. Still lying in the narrow bed with the crisp sheets. No sign of Nana and Poppa, Mimi or Grandpa. Not even a whisker or paw print to say Teddy or Bear were ever here.

“Dr. Sutherland?” I say, and my voice doesn’t feel like scraping razor blades over my throat for the first time in a while, so that’s an improvement at least. “I don’t think you did it right?”

She did something, though. Maybe the sedation is still taking hold. The world is bleary, like I’m looking through an old pane of glass that ripples in the light. Everything undulates slightly. The doctor says something, but the words are muffled. She turns to go, and I push up from the bed.

“Hey, wait,” I say, following after her. “What happens now?”

Panic flickers just beneath my collarbone, but also relief. I’m moving on strong, sturdy legs. And there’s no pain. For the first time in what feels like a lifetime, I take five steps, then five more, then another ten, and nothing hurts. There isn’t the grinding ache as my cancerous bones try to crumble. The weakness from muscles that haven’t had to do anything but keep me breathing since I became bedridden. I feel healthy. Alive.

The novelty of being able to follow after her with ease doesn’t do much to offset a growing unnerving sense that I don’t know what I should be doing. As I always used to tell the Sparks, unease is a sign of inaction. It’s your body trying to put you in motion toward the next goal. But what goal is there after death? Do I wait? Am I still technically dying? I thought things would be more obvious on the other side of this mortal coil.

The doctor rounds a corner. Everyone around me is fuzzy, like the way my eyes go wonky sometimes after a multi-hour Netflix binge, only when I blink it doesn’t get better.

“Hello?” I ask. No one replies.

As I pass an open hospital room door, a low voice filters toward me.

“And if you’ll just sign here. And here. And initial here. And here. Okay, now next copy—”

A handsome young man is standing by a bed. He’s white and looks like he’s in his mid-twenties, with curly brown hair and a yellow golf shirt and khakis. He’s also crystal clear, but when I glance quickly back out to the hallway, a blurry nurse in scrubs rushes by. Something weird is going on.

“Is that everything?” In the bed, a woman who looks like she has to be at least a hundred is holding a pen. She’s got a tube in her throat, and I don’t even know how she spoke around it, but the man takes the pen and clipboard from her and flips through the pages before he finally nods and says, “Yup. That’s everything. If you’ll just follow me,” and suddenly her tubes are gone. So is her hospital gown. Her wispy hair has settled into white curls and she’s wearing a soft pink sweater and pearl necklace. She swings her legs over the side of the bed and hops up to her feet, smiling brightly.

“Will I see Joel?” she asks.

The man in the yellow shirt is putting his papers into a leather briefcase. “I don’t know. We can ask at the Reunification Desk. That’s not my department.”

“Um, excuse me.” I’m still hovering in the door. Both the man and woman look up suddenly, startled to see me. “Hi. Sorry to bother you, but—”

“What are you doing here?” the man asks.

“I don’t know. I was down the hall and I heard a voice. I thought—”

“Are you looking for afterlife? I don’t have any other pickups today.” He pulls a tablet from his bag and scrolls through screens. “What’s your name?”

“Me? Ember.”

“Amber?”

I flinch on old instinct. Mom called me Ember. She said I was her spark of inspiration. It’s where I got the name for my business after my first viral post. Find Your Spark. But the number of times I’ve been called Amber in my life—and now my death apparently—means sometimes I wish my mother had just called me Anne. Kate. Beth. Something short that couldn’t be mistaken for anything else.

“Ember,” I say again.

“Last name?”

“Munro.”

He’s tapping at the screen with a stylus. “Date of birth?”

I tell him and he keeps tapping. “What’s your mother’s maiden name?”

“My mother?” What are we doing? Resetting the password on my mortality? I just want to know how to get out of here.

He glares at me in annoyance. “Her maiden name?”

“Kleisath.”

The man stares at his screen, brows furrowed. He scrolls some more.

“Ember Munro. Age thirty-two years, seven months, twenty-nine days. Terminal bone cancer, metastasized to your lungs and lymph nodes.” He says it with all the compassion of a mechanic telling me my cabin filter needs replacing and I wince. Still, the fact he’s found me in whatever records he’s checking is a relief. Maybe he can’t drop me at that Reunification Desk too and I can find Nana and Poppa after all.

“Yeah, that’s me,” I say.

“Scheduled for medically assisted death at—” His frown deepens at the information on his screen. “But you’re not dead yet.”

“I’m not?” I glance at the old woman—though she still seems to be aging backwards and now doesn’t look like she can be more than sixty—who gives me an impatient smile. She’s definitely dead and has places to be.

“No.” The man taps on his tablet screen. “It says you have a few months to go. See here. November fourth. That’s more than six months away. What are you doing here?”

I open and close my mouth a few times. I hate this feeling. The one like I’m expected to know the answer when I’m in over my head. I’m supposed to have all the answers. That’s the whole point of being a life coach. Though I guess I’m not that anymore. You can’t be a life coach when you’re dead.

“November fourth?” I say, craning my neck to see his screen. Even if I’d let the cancer dictate the timing of things, the doctors didn’t think I had more than a month or so left. I’d have never made it to the fall.

“Yes, see here.” He points at his screen. “Four, eleven. That’s the date they filled in when they filed your paperwork.”

I stare harder, puzzling it through, and finally chuckle when realization hits.

“No, see? You got it backward. They put in the date month-day-year, not day-month-year. It’s April eleventh, not November fourth.”

He frowns, first at the tablet, then at me. Finally he sets the tablet down so he can fling both hands up in the air. “Well, that’s just great. I thought we standardized these things in the last century. It’s not that difficult, but no. No one thinks of the reapers.” He paces in a circle. The old woman sighs in irritation. Her gaze says she knows exactly what’s going on, and I really wish she could tell me where she got her intel, because no one left me so much as a So you’re dead. Now what? pamphlet.

The man is still ranting. “Do you know how many correction forms I’m going to have to fill out because of this? What am I supposed to do with you?”

“Uh . . . take me with you?” That much should be obvious. What am I going to do here? Wander the halls of the oncology ward?

“I don’t think so. Look at my schedule.” He picks up the tablet again and scrolls through a seemingly endless list. “I’ve got to drop Hazel off. Then there’s a flash flood in Germany that’s got my entire afternoon booked, then an early flu outbreak at a nursing home in Montana. Then I’m pulling a double on a wildfire in Australia. Fucking Australia. It’s always tomorrow there, so regardless of when I show up, I’m always behind. So no, Ms. Munro.” His gaze swings back to me, and I’ve never felt so small in my entire all-too-short afterlife. “I don’t have time to be picking up entitled ghosts who think they can jump the queue.”

“Entitled? Ghost? What queue?”

But he’s done with my questions. “Best I can do is leave a note when I get back to the office so someone can swing by to collect you later.”

“So you’re just leaving me?” There’s a quicksand feeling opening up beneath me and I have to reach out for the wall to steady myself, then nearly fall over when my hand slides right through the sheetrock like it’s not even there. “Wait. It’s not my fault. I was—”

Before I can plead my case, he takes the older woman by the hand and says, “Come on, Hazel. Let’s go find your husband.” Then they both vanish with a tiny popping sound like when the flames of a gas barbecue go out.

“Hello?” I say, but I already know no one will answer.

Dear Sparks, being dead really sucks.