The Dream
Last night I dreamed I was addled by grief. I was in a house which does not exist in life, but which in the dream was familiar, was home, and it was filled, even cluttered, with objects, each of which bore a singular, devastating power. Each was dense with my mother. Redolent, ringing, teeming with my mother. Each, as my gaze fell upon it, communicated its immensity. Taken together they imparted a shattering sense of impossibility, a terrible, unutterable awareness of magnitude, of infinite, untenable abundance. In the dream I was undone at my source, riven with the manifold vibrations of grief.
I woke to a sense of exhausted calm and a feeling of having been washed clean. I mean I rose from bed feeling as though my insides, my stomach and lungs and bones and endless twisting branches of nerves, had been scrubbed and rinsed and laid on warm, flat rocks to dry.
Year Seven
She is in her seventh year since diagnosis and the surgery that scrubbed her own torso as clean as possible of cancer, removing in the process her ovaries, uterus, fallopian tubes, spleen, omentum and inches of her intestines, and leaving behind uncountable lingering seeds of disease. "It's as if someone scattered a handful of rice," is how the surgeon described the size and number of pieces that remained. She is on her last chemo.
This spring
This spring, some days the air feels like lead. Some days it feels just like spring: lilac-sugared, ribboned with breeze.
Practice
I think last night's dream is not so much about sorrow or fear of impending loss as about the serious work of looking at enormity.
All our lives are practice for this.
6 comments:
I think it is a wonderful dream, with detail overwhelming and thorough.
You write beautifully of it and yes, the life is set to this task, and...keep it moving, the flow. That is important; essential.
Hugs for you, my friend. xoxo
Yesterday, my mom would have been 70 years old except she passed away Feb. 29th, 2004 in her eighth year post debulking surgery. I am sorry for what you are going through. Your writing is amazing, and I am glad you are sharing this.
Father practiced hard for his enormity. He had business cards made up describing himself as a thanatologist. He seemed to change himself into a completely new (and wiser) personality. Mother proceeded him in death and his hard work was enormously helpful in making the experience surprisingly wonderful for her and her family. A decade later his own death did not unfold as he had planned - he had lost the capacity to orchestrate it.
I inherited my mother's printer box filled with knicknacks from her life. A Google image search on "printer box" is delightful!
Horrible,why does everyone feel a need to comment on the beauty of the writing when the wrenching gut emptying(literally) aspect so overwhelms.Where is ,in fact the morning afters expunging of the nightmarish grief on every side proof that there is something positive ? Where is the hope? What is the sense that in fact every moment is preparing us for how to deal with this A Horrific thought in my view,to ponder like a constant bass line whose strong relations to the god Pan speaks of constant anxiety and grief,ugh,,,time to lighten up (me) whew
if so I will go back to being an alcoholic and drug addict and jump off the tz bridge .
Leah, did you live in Nyack? I think I might have known you when we were children. Did you ever attend Camp Kinderland?
(I was Sarah Arndt then.)
PS My mother died in 2009; this feels too familiar. I am sorry.
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