Once I graduated from high school she was still in my life on a constant basis, so that when the time came she went to college with me. Although I was glad to have her around again, what with the early days of being away from home so lonely and overwhelming, it was around this time that I also started to become resentful of her constant presence. I would go out and drink with my new friends, only to come back to my dorm to find her giving me the silent treatment for leaving her behind. Like, who wants their dead grandmother with them at a keg party? Still, she had been around for so long at that point that I let her stay with me all four years of school. It was a little embarrassing to have her there when I’d bring home boys I met at parties, or when I discovered the joys of self-pleasure, but I figured that if she had a problem with it then all she had to do was not look. Honestly, though, I tried not to think about her too much during those times because the voyeuristic dead grandmother thing was just a little too creepy, even for me.

And so it was that I graduated from college and became an adult. Grandma moved with me to New York City, her own old home. She showed me around her old Lower East Side neighborhood, her favorite spot in Central Park, and took me to the Museum of Natural History on the weekends to see the dinosaurs. We tried to work out a system so that I could go out with my friends on Saturday nights and after work without feeling guilty about it, but she’d get bored at home all alone. I’d leave the television on for her, but she complained that she couldn’t change channels. She missed reading, so I started leaving the newspaper strewn all over my floors and tables so that she could read them. My neighbors thought I was weird, but I didn’t care. My grandmother would not leave me, and since I was now an adult and no longer required her presence everywhere I went, that meant that I had to help her keep herself entertained if I was going to leave her alone at night.

As I began to travel the world, Grandma traveled with me. On long plane trips I was glad for the company, but most of the time I wished she would let me live my life. When I was 25 we went to South Africa to visit Zee. On the fourth day of our visit Zee took us to the African flea market at Bruma Lake. Correction: Zee took me to Bruma Lake. Zee had no idea about my grandmother.

“You have to haggle,” Zee told me after we had paid our two rand to get in to the market. “But you’re Jewish so I assume you already know how to do that.”

“I’ve had plenty of practice at the Nassau straw market in the Bahamas,” I answered her. “Bring it on.”

“If you want masks for your brother and Lily, then I suggest we start here,” she said, leading me to a large open warehouse full of nothing but African trinkets.

“Sounds good to me,” I said, following her. I had a feeling that the merchants had pegged me immediately as a tourist, so I kept my face neutral and my answers noncommittal as I browsed the stalls. I knew that Lily and my brother wanted masks, but I had no idea what to get everyone else. My grandmother kept whispering in my ear every time she saw something she liked, but by this point in my life I was used to her and ignored her. As I wandered around behind Zee I mentally started to wish, and not for the first time, that my grandmother would just leave me alone. When I was a little girl I enjoyed her company, but the older I got the more I wanted to live my life on my own.

“...made from the wood of ebony trees,” Zee said, and I cursed myself for having not paid any attention to what she had just said. “Leesh?” Oops. Caught.

“Sorry, I was just trying to decipher that t-shirt over there,” I tried to cover for myself.

“It’s in Zulu, honey, if you could actually translate that I’d be very impressed,” she said.

“Oh.” Way to go Alisha. “I don’t have my glasses on, I thought it was me.”

“Aren’t those prescription sunglasses?” Damn, sometimes I wished Zee wasn’t so unbelievably perceptive. I cleared my throat.

“Yes. Anyway.” I made as if I was suddenly very interested in the malachite elephant on the table next to me. “You were saying about the ebony trees?”

“I was saying that those stick figures over there are made from the wood of ebony trees, if you want to have a look at them.”

“Yes,” I said. Then I took a really good look at them. “Yes, actually I do. I think Trin might like one.” We walked over to the ebony stall, a small room on the corner of the market. It’s shelves and tables were overflowing with ebony figures of all shapes and sizes. On the shelves stood long skinny stick figures of African men and women carrying things on their heads, or with babies on their hips, or spears in their hands. The women had gorgeous bronze rings around their ankles, wrists, and necks. There were ebony animals, letter openers, ashtrays, spoons, and magnets in small straw baskets all over the tables. It was all incredibly beautiful.

“How much for the stick figures? The medium sized ones,” I asked the proprietress, an old woman sitting on a stool in the far corner of the stall.

“25 for you, 15 for your grandmother,” she said.

Caught completely off guard, it was all I could do to stutter back, “Wait, what?” The old woman looked up at me and smiled a wrinkly smile at me. “25 for you, 15 for the lady with you.”

I leaned forward so Zee wouldn’t hear this bizarre exchange. “You can see her?”

“Clear as day, girl. She is your grandmother, isn’t she? Or another ancestor?”

All I could do was nod dumbly. “Yeah, she’s my grandmother,” and in keeping with the completely peculiar nature of our discussion I then added, “So how come she gets the stick figures cheaper? She doesn’t have any money.”

“Iminyanya discount,” the old woman said, still smiling. “She likes my stick figures, yes? If you buy one in her honor I will give you the discount. Otherwise they are 25 rand each.” I did the mental calculations in my head: 25 rand was about three dollars and change. Not bad for such exquisite figures.

“I’ll take three,” I said. The woman smiled even brighter and began to wrap up the three I had chosen. Zee just looked at me. “One for Trin and one for me.”

“Then who’s the third one for?” Can’t get anything past Zee.

“Her grandmother,” the old woman answered. “The iminyanya who goes with her everywhere.” She finished wrapping the figures in bubble wrap, put them in a bag, and handed them to me. As Zee and I left the stall I heard her say, “Sala kahle.” I looked at Zee in confusion. “Good-bye,” she translated for me.

As soon as we left the stall Zee pulled me aside. “You didn’t tell me your grandmother’s spirit is still with you.”

“You never asked.”

“You’re ashamed of me,” my grandmother said.

Since I no longer had to hide it from Zee I went ahead and answered her. “I am not ashamed of you, you’re just a pain in my ass sometimes. And not everybody understands, you know.”

“How long has this been going on?” Zee asked.

“Since she died. She followed me home from her funeral.”

“Why you and not one of your cousins or your brother?”

“Don’t know,” I shrugged. “Guess she liked me best.”

“You could have told me,” Zee said, slightly hurt.

“I didn’t think you’d understand. It’s kind of weird, you know.”

“Zulu religion, and many African religions, practice ancestor worship. It’s believed that our ancestors watch over us from the spiritual world,” Zee explained.

“From the spiritual world, I think, is the key phrase there,” I said. I nodded my head in my grandmother’s direction. “She’s always around me.”

“Too good for your grandmother now?” Said the voice from beyond.

I couldn’t help it, I rolled my eyes at her. “You know what I mean, Grandma. I appreciate your company, but I’m an adult now and don’t need a chaperone.”

Zee said, “Is she around you all the time?”

“Mostly,” I told her. “Sometimes I can convince her to stay at my apartment when I go out, but mostly she tags along wherever I go and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“It was a Jewish funeral?” Zee asked.

“Yes,” I answered.

“Hmmm” was all Zee said.

Later, back at Zee’s house in Johannesburg, she came into the guest room I was staying in and plopped herself down on my bed while I put everyone’s presents in my suitcase to take home.

“Am I sitting on her right now?” she asked.

I squinted my eyes and pursed my lips at her as if she had just spoken Chinese to me. “You’re not funny, you know.”

“I’m serious.”

“That’s very considerate of her,” my grandmother piped in.

“Nobody’s talking to you,” I said to Grandma, and then, to Zee, “No, you’re not sitting on her. She usually just hovers around in the air somewhere near me, being annoying.”

“You kids these days have no respect for your elders,” Grandma said.

“Grandma,” I said to her, “I love you, but this is my life. Butt out.”

Zee said, “There is a way to send her to unKulunkulu, the spirit world, if you want.”

“Is that like Hell? I don’t want to send her there,” I said.

“No, it means ‘The Greatest of the Great,’” Zee said.

I looked over at my grandmother. “That doesn’t sound too bad, does it?” She didn’t answer me. I told Zee, “Let’s do it. We don’t need to sacrifice anything, do we?”

“Not unless you feel like haggling for a goat all afternoon,” she said.

“No thanks. I’m all haggled out from Bruma Lake,” I said, relieved. Not that I had anything against other people’s beliefs, I just didn’t think that I had it in me to kill any live animal larger than a bug. “So what do we do?”

“Come on,” Zee said, walking out of the guest room and beckoning me to follow. “This will take a while.”

Four hours later found us driving northeast of Johannesburg, out into the middle of nowhere. All I could see around me was green, green, green. Even the Johannesburg skyline had long since vanished from sight. Neither Zee nor I had spoken much in the car, and my grandmother had kept absolutely silent in the back seat. She was angry with me, I knew, but I also knew that if I didn’t do this ritual for her, then her spirit would haunt me forever. I further justified what I was doing by telling myself that I was giving her the peace in death that she deserved.

When Zee decided we had driven far enough, she pulled her car over to the side of the road. We got out and walked about half a mile away, with Zee carrying a shovel and a knife in one bag and me carrying a photo of my grandmother, the ebony stick figure I had bought for her, and a six pack of beer in another bag. Zee walked over to a buffalo thorn tree, took out the knife, and began to cut a branch off it.

“This type of tree is usually reserved for Zulu chiefs when they are buried. But for our purposes, since we are not making a sacrifice, it will do,” she said. She handed me the branch and then knelt down on the ground and began to dig. I took Grandma’s photo out and looked at it one last time. It was the last photo taken of her while she had still been healthy and alive, and to my knowledge no one else in the world had the negatives or copies of it.

When Zee was finally finished digging she stood up and said to me, “Put the photo and the stick figure in the hole, and the branch on top.”

I did as she asked, and as I lay the photograph in the ground I whispered, “Goodbye, Grandmother. I will miss you. May you find peace in unKulunkulu and watch over me from afar.” I tried not to, but one tear managed to escape my eyes and fall into the hole with the branch, the stick figure and the photo. I looked up at Zee. “Now what?” She didn’t say anything, just knelt down across from me and we both began to refill the hole with our hands.

When all the loose dirt had been packed back into place, Zee said, “Now the beer.” I took out the six pack. “We honor the spirits of our ancestors by giving them libations.” I opened one can and poured it onto the pile of dirt we had just packed. “Peace be with you, Mrs. Stein,” Zee said reverently as I poured.

“Peace, Grandmother,” I said. When that beer was gone I handed Zee another one and opened one for myself. We drank one beer each in silence, then watched the sun set over the vast plains of rural South Africa.

When we finally drove back to Johannesburg I felt, for the first time in my life, truly alone.