"Facts are the enemy of truth" – Miguel de Cervantes

There has been much speculation about my mother's life. Even now, forty-odd years after she first drafted "The Captain," readers still write the publisher who faithfully and very profitably reprints her novels every few years. The Boston-based company direct-deposits the sizable royalty checks into her estate's account and each month courteously forwards fan e-mail (most of it from women) to me.

They all want to know the same thing: Who was the ghostly seaman based upon, really? Was he a figment of my gifted mother's imagination or an ectoplasmic reality for a stunning yet deserving every-woman; the ideal father we all would wish for our children?

Why did my beautiful, widowed mother, never remarry? Her patrician features smile levelly yet very unselfconsciously from the back of over one million books, her chiseled Teutonic features topped by emerald eyes and a carefully coiffed sixtyish bob. If she wasn't so beautiful, I wonder if anybody would have cared?

I suppose it's a testament to her Grace Kelly looks as well as my mother's witty but emotive prose style that anyone in 2010 would consider a ghostly presence remotely viable. The Internet seems to flicker like a ghostly flame before fans, who frequently post theories about ways my elegant, hard-headed mother could have lived with an opinionated spirit who cheerfully and knowingly exuded testosterone with every jaunty nautical step of his afterlife.

Even in the Vietnam-obsessed early 1970s, the public evidently had a need-to-know. An intrepid Boston Globe Sunday magazine reporter who once stalked mom around Schooner Bay and from the rocky crags of the beach near our house wrote: "This most eligible widow often can be seen strolling the roiling shores of Coastal Maine -- chatting cheerfully to herself. Occasionally she pauses to smile upwards, as if stopping to consider the opinion of some unseen presence. Unfortunately, the taciturn Down Easterners of her community exhibit that famous New England rectitude when pressed about their most famous resident. Few, in fact, will even acknowledge Schooner Bay has an eclectic, 100-year-old seaside cottage, built by a retired mariner. Claymore Gregg, the only known living Gregg descendant blanches, when asked directly. Certainly, this city clerk is no Daniel Gregg. As for the beautiful Carolyn Muir, the PTO officer turned romance writer simply shrugs when asked why she chooses to remain obviously alone on the rocky coast of one of the country's most desolate (some would say Godforsaken) stretches of beach. 'But I'm so busy with my children!' she answers sincerely, if unconvincingly. "Fantasies are for my readers."

Captain Gregg, of course, watched this whole interview from just a few feet away. "I don't think your mother is actually aware of how beautiful she is," he opined distractedly, as the newsman barraged my mother with questions while a photographer snapped away. I, of course, could only smile wanly. What did I know? I was 12 or 13 when "The Captain" was first published. My mother was, well, my mother and I had just arrived at that charming point in life where she could possibly do no right. I found her hair-sprayed bob way out of synch with the long, straight look of the times and was terribly afraid my friends might learn anyone actually cared that she had a life, let alone a spectral boyfriend. Recently, I'd begun to notice strange looks from mothers of friends who whispered about that eccentric Carolyn Muir. I don't know whether they were relieved to read Schooner Bay's most eligible widow really wasn't interested in their husbands or worried Captain Gregg, the town's most-famous invisible resident, had gone too far this time with his well-documented haunting. Still, the cocoon of eccentricity that spun tightly around isolated coastal communities in those days lovingly enveloped my brother and me. We grew up cared for and accepted by people who would never betray our family to the outside world as much as they might harbor their own theories about things that went bump in the night at Gull Cottage.

Today, I'm an established psychiatrist in Portland. I understand the interior and sometimes unbelievable lives of my troubled patients. As accepting as I am of their realities, I should know better than to actually confess that during my own childhood and early adulthood, my mother unofficially married a man born well over 100 years before she and enjoyed a romance so all-consuming she never really needed anyone else or, for that matter, validation or acknowledgement from any of her peers. The few friends who knew, knew better than to tell tales. As for family, only Grandma and Grandpa Williams were invited into the circle, so as to finally squelch unending concern about "Caro's happiness." Social snobs that they were, mom had little doubt they'd be talking soon to anyone in Philadelphia, although she told me years later that Grandma had idly speculated about whether there'd be any more grandchildren.

Jonathan still lives at Gull Cottage and actually writes for a living. He thinks their improbable love story makes incredible copy, and that reader speculation should be encouraged as good for sales. Much to my professional chagrin, he occasionally fans the 'did-she/didn't-she' flames of romantic speculation. "What do you expect from a shrink?" he once told the Hartford Courant, to my great embarrassment. "Did she suggest that believing in the possibility of ghosts says more about you and her readers than it does my mother? I believe Jung would suggest her novels actually have a psycho-sexual subtext linked to the fact she and the Captain shared a 'cabin' together."

Then he laughed, the reporter noted, before adding: "I don't think anyone could have invented a better father for my sister or me even if she never enjoyed a Freudian sexual reawakening."

Fortunately, Jonathan doesn't give many interviews. When he does, he's usually somewhat muzzled by publicists our publisher conferences in on three-way calls about "The Captain." These phone interviews have increased since the book garnered traction on college campuses as a retro-feminist novel about a prominent society widow struggling for independence after the death of her philandering husband. Calls from student newspapers and scholarly journals are on the rise. The publisher wants to keep it vague. "Please keep your answers nuanced," a publicist once intoned. "People prefer unrequited longing and sexual tension to the real thing. They want their lovers separated and suffering."

So Jonathan usually sticks to the script and lets readers decide whether he's another writer with an over-the-top imagination or heir to one of the most beautiful love stories of the late 20th century. Readers also like to hear about the supposed ghost's sometimes amusing interventions in mortal life, his penchant for 150-year-old seagoing swearwords, his favorite cigars, and the adoring gazes and the looks of tenderness that enveloped this blustery apparition every time he materialized around my 'mother.'

Jonathan loved, still loves – more than almost anyone in the world – the Captain and poignantly clings to any chance to keep his memory alive even with anonymous readers who never met him. But he never disrespects our mother or the Captain. We protect as fiercely as her readers the Captain's special relationship with Carolyn Muir, which tethered him to our lives for over 30 very special years and ended only with her death, at age 70.

We weren't there when mom passed away unexpectedly yet peacefully from an undetected infection. Jonathan and his kids were vacationing in Vermont while his wife visited her parents. Only Elizabeth, Martha's trusted niece, was home at the time. She called my office in Portland, crying quietly. Just 20 minutes ago, she said so softly I could barely understand her, the front door burst open as if a great burst of wind swept suddenly through the house, which she noticed was suddenly cold and unnaturally quiet. The walkway was empty, guarded silently, as always, by the stone lions. By instinct, Elizabeth said she ran to the Captain's cabin, as we jokingly called it, where the door to the room stood ajar, still quivering from some unseen gale. The windows were closed, much to her surprise. And there on the bed, with a smile on her face, lay my mother, peacefully on her side, eyes open and unblinking, one arm stretched toward her Captain's telescope. There was no sign of the master, Elizabeth said. "Aunt Martha warned me it would be like this," she sobbed. "As much as we loved the Captain and he cared for us, he wasn't here for us, really. She always said he was only allowed to stay for your mother – something about unfinished business."

It may sound maudlin, but both Jonathan and I and even the grandkids know this to be true. We were grateful just to have had the Captain in our lives, even if it meant celebrating two lives and one death simultaneously. We took comfort, not offense, in knowing our mother's real living had just begun and that both she and the captain now awaited us on the "other side." My mother's may have been the first funeral in history where there were no doubts about the dearly departed. We buried her in one of the long, 19th-century gowns the captain loved so much, with red, pink and white roses atop her coffin. Few in Schooner Bay were surprised when we laid her to rest next to Daniel Gregg and erected a new monument above them both. Always one for the grand gesture, Jonathan inscribed "The Heart Knows What the Mind Cannot See" on the granite, words he said he'd seen in a movie about another sort of improbable love "between a psychiatrist and her patient," he told me wryly.

Two weeks later, as I rummaged through mother's papers, I wondered if my fingers would find what my mind suspected had to exist – the journals I knew my mother faithfully kept since the day we arrived in Gull Cottage in 1968. Like many writers, she referred to them as her "day-books" and used them to note bits of dialogue or happenings which piqued her interest. Or so I thought until the morning I found an envelope barely sticking out from behind the Captain's portrait.

"Candy my dear," read the letter obviously penned by the Captain. "Please check the false bottom of the black trunk in the wheelhouse to find your Mother's journals, which I know you and Jonathan will so curiously seek after we both are gone. Edit them judiciously and publish them, as a sequel to "The Captain." You may tone them down, to suit your mother's privacy, but do not edit anything which speaks directly to my virility or legacy as New England's strongest man."

I didn't know it was possible to laugh and cry at the same time. That was so like Captain Gregg.

"Please use the proceeds as you and Jonathan see fit. And, my dear, please limit Jonathan's involvement in this project. He may be the writer, but you are the gifted one who truly understands the ways of the heart. My dear, I have not read them myself, but trust you will know what to do with them so that our story may continue to benefit the Muir family."

And so, my own dear readers, consider yourselves officially introduced to a special sequel to "The Captain," a companion novella ,one which you may consider fact or fiction, depending upon your own beliefs and preferences. As for what did or didn't make this latest book, you will have to wait until 25 years after the deaths of both myself and my brother Jonathan. My mother's papers will remain sealed, until that time at the University of Maine. Meanwhile, you can assume that in no way has this book been edited to either enhance or impugn the Captain's less-than-understated masculinity. No literary license could ever improve on this New England original.

Please be kind to this, my mother's first and only non-fictional work. This time, the facts are the truth.