Half & Half

panorama
Posted by Hello

i sapped all weekend considering myself "permanently tired." after laying down on my side or my back for so long, my sinuses filled up and toasted me with pain, pain, pain.

do sinuses ever explode inside a person's head, and send pus directly to whatever is left of the brain?

at any rate the aspirin worked and by time for work today i had just enough. just enough energy to get from one end of the day to the other working doggishly for.

the person i work for. more later.

but over the weekend i had a dream and it won't let me go; it disturbs me. my ex-husband was in it, and bekah had been kidnapped. in the dream i did not know bekah was dead. it was like we were working angles to get her back. then a psychic gave us the date of July 29, and this was to be the day that Bekah would die. but we scoffed, and agreed, "Psychics can be wrong. It is possible for a psychic to make a mistake." total denial.

then i woke up, and it hit me: bekah's been dead, in reality for almost three and one-half years!

two months or so after she died, i dreamt we were together at a party, at my childhood home in torrance. bekah was in my arms and smiling, but she was silent and weightless. we were dancing and though there were many other people there it was as if bekah and i were alone at our own little party...i thought, "i know bekah's dead...i'll just dance over to the mirror and i'll see only myself, because dead people do not show up in mirrors." which i did, only to see both of us reflected.

my personal interpretation of the early dream is that at that point in time i considered myself essentially as dead as bekah, if not more so [if "life" is defined by "vitality" at that point in the proceedings i believed in bekah's more than my own]; conversely she had to be just as alive as myself. hence our faces in the mirror, and the poem half & half.

once or twice since i have had dreams in which i did not know bekah was dead. just not very often, and not sticking to me like the recent dream. it shook me, and my confidence, especially in my road to recovery. have i not traveled as far as i thought? and does the road ever grow short, in this lifetime? maybe recovery for a bereaved mother is nothing but a combination of determined denial, optimism, stubbornness, and can never be more than that.

it's not that i believe that, i believe in the possiblity of happiness for myelf, in this lifetime, i think i really do! it's that the dream shook me, and for the rest of the weekend i cried copiously, though ostensibly at the tearjerkers i was watching on the tube. "terms of endearment" being one...i tuned in to that one just as emma has to tell her oldest son, "i know you love me." cried and cried.

today at lunch still haunted i called my lifelong friend [one of two i am proud to claim] marcia, and told her about the dream. as she has maintained since bekah was killed, she said again, "you'll never get over it." and i protested as i have since bekah was dead, and though i didn't bring up the same argument again, it still holds true.

from the first moment it did weigh on my mind: do i live, now that bekah does not? i observed that i did not drop dead upon hearing the news [i'd always sort of wondered if i would]. time passed, more time than i can believe [and i mean that in the most profound, deeply felt way imaginable]. still i breathed...i survived. i have a son who will be 13 in May, and has never known or been supported by his father. i have a 21-year-old son who is in the Navy, underappreciated and brilliant, a writer...and a 29-year-old son [who will not cop to his own age: my son's bothered by his own age!] who is a plumber now raising his own two sons on his own.

from the first minutes hours and days of bereavement i have maintained that if i must and will survive, i want to live. now, will i accomplish that? sure...sure. why not? dreams aren't all that i am, and maybe there's an explanation for it that is not necessarily a judgment upon my efforts to recover.

amen. bekah, i love you and always will
XXXXXXXXXXXXOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO




beautiful spirit
Posted by Hello


me
Originally uploaded by barbtries

- posted by barbara @ 1/18/2005 03:11:00 AM