In Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist there is a ghost called Mr Tuttle, who haunts the house of Lauren Hartke, the body artist. This paper explores the part that this too-solid ghost plays in Hartke’s work of mourning for her husband, arguing, as Jacques Derrida does in The Work of Mourning, that “Speaking is impossible, but so too would be silence or absence,” so that, if she is not to remain forever silent in her life, Hartke must learn to speak impossibly. This she does by following the ghost, who instructs her in the repetitions, the mimetism, which let a dead man speak. Internalising Mr Tuttle’s process, which she first interprets in purely technical terms, Hartke learns to speak as a ghost, using a voice “not quite her own,” the voice of the art of mourning. The ghost, then, is about keeping distance: we say, as Derrida says to the absent loved one, “you are at once too absent and too close: in me, inside me.” DeLillo makes this as true for distances of time as for space. Ultimately, it is through a work of mourning which gives time to the ghost to speak that Hartke comes to live again.