Dreams

It’s three o’clock in the morning and I can’t get back to sleep. A dream woke me up, a dream where Don was telling me he was leaving. He said he didn’t want to go and couldn’t figure out why he felt that he had to do it. He didn’t know when it would happen, he said, but soon. “Fine, then go!” I told him. “Do it right now!” I wasn’t going to beg although I wanted to do just that. We were standing in the basement of my old house. We had just started painting the walls and I was feeling overwhelmed with the idea that I had to do that huge job all by myself. I wanted my life partner back but he had already left me in spirit, I thought, so what was the point of him staying around physically? I woke up trying to figure out what my dream meant. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand the setting of the dream was inspired by my recent basement flooding and my feelings of being overwhelmed by all the work that came with it. And now I’m worrying that Don’s spirit (which I’ve always felt close by me since he died) is fading and will one day just be a distant memory. 
 

I read something in another widow’s blog that describes exactly how I feel about widowhood, 16 months out from Don’s passing and having just gone through my first crisis---the flood---without him. She said she was on the peripheral of many people’s lives but the center of no one’s. I can’t get that sentence out of my head. No one has my back, no one is at the center of my life or me the center of theirs. People care and show concern but it's not the same as having a life partner. I have known this from the funeral, of course, but that fact slaps you in the head whenever there is something good or bad going on in your life you want to share.

I was at the senior hall yesterday for a lecture given by a couple who in retirement spent seven years sailing around the world, living on their sailboat while at ports in places like Italy, Spain, Casablanca, the Canary Islands even some countries in the Middle East. What interesting and brave people they were. In my early twenties I owned a little sailboat and the lecture/slide show reminded me of some of the dreams I had in the days before Don---the non-swimmer---entered my life. The first week of their voyage the woman broke her arm in the middle of the ocean and had to wait to get it set. I would have turned around right there and then. But she didn’t let anything, much less her pain, get in the way of living out her dream. By contrast I just live to armchair dream. As they say no guts, no glory.

While at the lecture a wood carver was in the back of room with some of his creations. He was trying to drum up interest in a class he wanted to teach and it took me about two seconds to add my name to the list of interested people. He’s going to call us all to work out a day and time that suits the majority of students. So while other retired people are out seeking adventure around the world I’ll be sitting in a rocker whittling a block of wood into shavings. Oops. Back in the 80s I took a wood carving class and I still have an unfinished turtle to prove it. In college I once spent an entire semester carving a piece of marble into a woman’s torso---it started out as a rejected tombstone with a misspelled name and I got an 'A' that semester. Having seen Michelangelo’s Pieta when it was brought to The States for the 1964-65 New York’s World’s Fair, I wanted to be just like him. In my naivety I didn’t realize how huge I was dreaming. Now, I’ll settle for finishing my turtle before I die. My dreams are getting more doable with age.

Tomorrow I’m going back to the senior hall for a Victorian Tea. It will feature a speaker from the public museum who will come dressed in a Victorian nightgown and over her hour and a half presentation she’ll dress in traditional period garb layer by layer explaining each garment’s purpose and history as she puts it on. For more than a few decades of my life I was enamored by all things Victorian so I expect to have a good time. But I’ll be haunted by a summer when Don and I looked at every run down, fixer upper Victorian house for sale in two counties. We dreamed of restoring one back to its original glory. And now? I dream of finding something suitable in my closet to wear to a formal Victorian tea. 

There are all kinds of dreams in our lives---big ones and small ones, old and brand new dreams plus broken dreams due to the death of someone important to us. Then there are dreams realized like the couple did who sailed around the world, and youthful dreams gladly discarded to make room for love like I did with Don and my sailboat. Our daytime dreams are unlimited but the ones that are the hardest dreams to make my peace with are the ones that come in the night and keep me from falling back to sleep. Like the dream I had tonight that forces me to acknowledge what my heart doesn't want to admit is happening: Don has been gone physically a long time now and I'm feeling his spirit around me less and less often. And that takes my sadness to a whole new level.© 

 above: painting by Betty Pieper