The Husband and I spent a long, humid night in Memphis, steeped in the scent of smoky barbecue, submerged in the blues. Eventually too much sizzle did us in, and we headed back to our hotel in West Memphis, both of us exhausted and slow-cooked in our own sweat.
As The Husband navigated our car over the Hernando de Soto bridge, I suddenly sat up straight and said, “Jeff Buckley died here.”
“Who?”
“Jeff Buckley. The singer. He drowned right here.”
“Here? Like, right here?”
Well, I wasn’t really sure where, I admitted. It was somewhere in the Mississippi. But it’s a massive river. Any part of it could have taken a young singer’s life.
Curiosity got the better of me, and later that night I looked up the details of Jeff Buckley’s death. Sure enough, he died in Memphis — and within sight of the Hernando de Soto bridge. A chill ripped down my spine.
I haven’t thought about Jeff Buckley in years. I can’t even remember the last time I pulled out one of my Jeff Buckley albums. So what was it that summoned the memory of him then? There?
I am a person who believes in ghosts. I believe that a person’s energy never disappears from this world — that my mother whispered in my ear the night before her funeral, that her grandmother once paid a similar visit to the family, and sometimes I can still feel the both of them in the air around me.
I also believe that the veil between worlds in thinnest in the South. I don’t know why. Maybe the humidity weighs it down, makes that veil thick and droopy and, therefore, easily passable.
What I know for certain is that a wispy recollection of Jeff Buckley came to me in Memphis. I crossed over a bridge and looked in a rear-view mirror, all the while humming “Lover You Should’ve Come Over.” I felt the fullness of a life in the space of his death, and it reminded me that people are never really gone. They just temporarily drift away.