distant constellations

This morning I had a dream that I was with my mother. I had missed her so much, was so glad to be with her. I was walking with her somewhere slightly familiar and also new. She was with me, close, so close that speaking was almost not necessary. Almost.

In real life my mother passed away seven and a half years ago. Even writing that today seems insane. As I told my good friend a few years ago, when in tears in a taxi cab on the way to meet some friends for dinner, "You think 'If someone told me I would never see that person again, I would die... I would just die'...but you don't. You just get up and look at the sun and keep moving and fall apart and cry in the back of taxi cabs".

In my dream she was back for a reason - she had been brought back for a singular purpose... my father's death? I can't remember. I was walking with her and remembering how simply walking slightly behind her I could smell her, feel her presence.

When the purpose for her visit was over she said she had to go again. I was ravaged with sadness. But I also knew it could be no other way. In the dream I asked her, "Do you think when you're dead?" and she looked at me with a deep sadness mixed with a sense of acceptance or... peace? And she shook her head. Then she said, "There's such an overabundance of... everything." And she was gone.

Then it was my husband. I was walking with him much in the same position and he was telling me he had to go. I felt that same sense of fight in me that had torn me up when I was watching my mother die and that sense of rebellion of "I WILL NOT LET THIS HAPPEN" mixed with a deeper, more still, realization that it would be no other way.

He was crying in the dream, but had already started to fade away from me. I kissed him one last time and whispered something - maybe "I will find you"? I can't remember.

This dream is different from the dreams I had when she was dying, and for the first year and a half after she passed I had nightmares every night. I would be underwater with dead bodies, gaping mouths, flesh floating as fish swam by, I would be screaming so long and loud for doctors to save her that I would start choking, and my gag reflex would silence me. I would vomit up blood over and over as doctors in lab coats stood over me, cold and silent.

So you see, this dream is relatively calm in comparison. And in these dreams she feels much farther away. She has moved on. But when she returns our connection has not diminished at all... it's a strange combination.

I woke up and today is Thursday in NYC which means on my husbands favorite radio station it is time for my favorite dj's show - Trouble in the Modern World on WFMU. He turned on the radio when I was waking up and after he had left for work she played a Euro-tech dance type of song whose main lyric was "Resuscitation" being repeated over and over with the beat. The female singer says, "Give me the kiss of life... resuscitation, resuscitation".

I stared at the radio and got dressed. Now I'm trying to shake off that feeling of an old, deep pain that will never go away. And a feeling of trying to reach out beyond the grave.