I originally wrote this on or about 10/24/2019. I’m not sure what brought me to my outdated blog today, but I actually had a different dream about my mom just last night. It was a difficult one. I don’t remember as much about it as I was able to remember about the one in Oct. 2019 that is recounted below.
I have been thinking and talking about grief often this year. I have spent some time reminding folks that grief is not only about death. Overall, grief is about LOSS. Divorce, cancelled plans, graduations that could not safely be conducted, not being able to go to the movies, not being able to go to work as usual, losing respect for a person because they say things like, “I’m not social distancing because I don’t like it,” death of a loved one, watching a loved one experience the death of someone you didn’t know, etc. Grief is just having a real barn-burner of a year. I have thought about mom throughout this COVID19 experience. If she was still alive, I would feel worse in so many ways, but one of the newer ways would be the fear that she’d contract it and die alone in an empty hospital room, struggling to breathe, which was already difficult for her. She has been gone for close to 14y now.
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10/24/2019
I had a dream about my mom recently. It seems like it’s the first one I’ve had in a while. Maybe they are further between now than they used to be. It seemed like a long dream. I woke up with my alarm at 7am and felt like I just came out of the dream. I despise how I feel after dreams about my mom. I tried to go back to sleep. I remember that a part of me hoped to go back to the dream, while another part of me just wanted some peaceful sleep.
In the dream, my mom was alive and well. She was living on a farm with a man who adored her and took care of everything. Their home was cute and surrounded by a large yard and fields. There was a barn in the backyard. The area was so flat. Mom was well. She was walking, talking, smiling, laughing, holding babies, hugging people. There was no evidence she had any kind of illness. Those dreams are so sweet. You have no idea, and I can’t appropriately articulate it.
My real memories of how mom’s voice and laugh sounded are vague, at best. I have a home movie that gives me a little of her voice, her mannerisms and her smile before the MS. That’s another thing – she was diagnosed with MS when I was 6 years old. Over the years, I decided that what I remember of her from after the diagnosis isn’t really her. It’s her, tainted by the disease. Have you ever tried to remember what someone was like when you were under the age of 6? And consider that you didn’t know for 10+ years that you needed to preserve those memories. I have almost nothing real. The home movie helps fill in gaps, but I know that I remember from watching the movie, not from firsthand experience.
The weirdest part of the dream was the acknowledgement that mom had been dead. You read that right. Everyone was aware that mom was back from the dead. When I addressed this as a problem, people (sorry for the lack of detail, y’all know how Dream Land is) reminded me that, yes, they knew she was reanimated and there was a real possibility that she would have to return to being dead, but for the time being, she was alive, well and happy, and I needed to celebrate that, instead of worrying that she had previously been deceased. It came across as if I was being a “bad sport” about her being alive.
Common Adventure 