Dreaming

I don’t feel many emotions when I’m awake, but I’ve been having dreams that have me waking up full of melancholy. One where I was at the house I grew up in watching my mother plant flowers, another where I was in a movie theater with my husband making fun of trailers before the film. These are good dreams, but they are also grief dreams, and I’m left to grapple with a persistent sense of missing once I’m no longer in them. I think many people are having these right now, as we all start to realize that things we assumed would never change will instead be relegated to a “before”, which we have already left without saying goodbye.

 

More confusing are the dreams about my father. (Who, if you’ll recall, shot himself in early February. I can’t help mentioning it, it’s become the most distinctive thing about him.) A dream where his suicide attempt wasn’t successful, but somehow I hadn’t been told he’s been alive since then, but then he dies for real. Most recently, a dream where I’m sitting in a car in a parking lot, and he gets out of one of the other cars behind me. That’s the whole dream, just watching him in the rearview mirror as he stands up and looks around. 

 

This is another kind of grief dream, obviously, but it’s so different that I’m not sure that the same word can cover both things. On waking, I’m struck by how well I knew him, how well I had to know him, all the way down to memorizing how he moved through space, but I feel angry that I know him so well.

 

There was a time, say two years of my life, where the grappling-with-change work, the “personal growth”, was struggling to pry apart the differences between a father and a husband. You can’t choose a dad, but you can choose a husband. Fathers aren’t supposed to have sex with their children, but it’s ok to have sex with your husband. Emotionally supporting each other is what married people are supposed to do, but it’s not what children are supposed to do for their parents. 

 

Like I said, it took a couple of years for me to really learn this. And when I say “me,” I don’t just mean the adult writing this, but all the various internal characters that made up the full span of my memories and personality, who used to be much more separate. It took the longest time for the really little kid parts to understand, but we all got it eventually. 

 

One of the things about being married, or at least about me being married, is that I love my husband on a lot of different levels. This is necessary because sometimes we’re not exactly connecting on some of them, but I’ve got the others to get me through. Sometimes he does extremely thoughtful caring stuff but then lets loose a fart so lethal I have to leave the room. Sometimes, him just being around irritates me, but I love the shape of his face, the feel of his hand in mine, how he looks when he’s sleeping. I adore everything about him but rarely all at once, which is (I assume) ok and normal.  I chose him, and I willingly and joyfully reencounter things I love about him every day.

 

So, back to the dream where I recognize my father just by how he shifts his weight in the driver’s seat before standing up. It sickens me. It’s hard to even get to whatever is at the core of it because my brain keeps feeling everything at once, and the noise makes it impossible to follow a single thread down to its source. I feel sick that I monitored him so closely. I feel sick that I *had* to. I relive a thousand other things about our relationship that are the sort of things you only know about a lover you live with — and I don’t even mean sex. I mean knowing that he put his cologne on by tipping the bottle into the hollow of his throat, onto each wrist, and into his belly button. The order of operations of how he shaved his face. The type of underwear he wore. The way he looked when he was sorting mail, and how he always used a letter opener like he was a fancy Edwardian gentleman instead of a mechanic from Indiana. How he would slap his own face to stay awake when we were on road trips and driving late at night. The way he said my name when he was waking me up.

 

All these things are gone. These and a thousand thousand other things I memorized about him — but they don’t help me fall back in love with him. They’re just things I had to know because I had to know him very, very well, no matter how hard I tried to get away. So I don’t know what to call it thinking about him sometimes still makes me cry, or that I dream about him sometimes, and when I wake up, I wake up quiet and sad. 

 

Nuance is still hard for me, made harder right now when we’re all compressed by global events. I see articles about ways to find joy in quarantine, and mostly, they remind me that I can’t remember the last time I was happy. I don’t feel sad, I just don’t feel much of anything these days. I go to work, I try to help my husband out with our kid, I work out, I sleep. 

 

At work, I mostly do nothing, and then occasionally, an emergency happens, and I’m consistently the one helping everyone else feel ok calling 911. My advice to you is: if you are wondering if you should call an ambulance, the fact that you are wondering means it’s time to call for an ambulance. As you read this, do you need an ambulance? My guess is you thought “no”, and you knew it, decisively and certainly. Once you enter the uncertain, you’re at yes. If you’d like an algorithm with more nuance than that, get CPR-certified and take a Stop the Bleed class. Those’ll give you more skills for handling certain emergencies, which can help you identify what is or isn’t an emergency at all. 

 

I don’t know how to end this note — and it is literally a Note. I’m back to composing on my phone while at work. Please keep washing your hands and wearing your masks. Put the mask over your nose and mouth. Watch a YouTube tutorial or something before you cave and give yourself bangs or whatever you’re doing to your hair. Put one foot in front of the other, metaphorically if not literally. These will all be good stories one day. It’s not that bad. 

 

We’re alive, so it’s not that bad.