I barely write anymore. Every time I think about it, I say to myself no one wants to hear about the life of a 32 year old single mother who has put on weight, doesn’t have a job and lays in bed swiping through pathetic attempts at online dating.
Ouch. That sounded harsh.
But here I am sitting at my keyboard as the sun has barely comes up because I’ve awoken from the dream again.
Let’s be honest, it’s a full fledged horror story nightmare and I’m still sweaty from tossing and turning all the way through it.
I wish I could say this is the first time it’s happened but it sneaks into my sleep when I least expect it or usually on a night when I feel like I’m doing okay.
Tears are filling my eyes as I try and recount what my brain has just shown me. If toddler movies have taught me anything the dream production team in my head is a wacky place.
I’m running, I’m running and searching for Joe. He’s alive in my dream but I thought he was dead. I realize he’s been all alone, dying alone and I can’t find him. He’s in a giant hotel when I run to the front desk and ask where he is, she scribbles down a room number on a white paper. He’s on floor 8. I’m preparing myself to see him because I know it can’t be good, I mean he’s been here dying alone though I’m sure he’s already dead because my real brain and my dream brain are at odds in this haze of sleep.
I search for floor 8 to get to him, please let me get there in time but there’s no floor 8. There’s 7 straight into floor 9. I can’t find floor 8 because there is no floor 8 but I know he’s there somewhere. He left me a voicemail saying he is dying but I thought he was already gone so I have to get to him, please let me get to him.
I’m running and I’m searching and then I wake up.
Now I lay here and I’m still searching. The nightmare doesn’t end as I catch my breath and try and remind myself the reality verse the terrifying scenes played out in dreamland.
He’s gone. I was there. I did say goodbye but the truth of the dream is that I still can’t find him.
Grief is such a shit show.
1 year and 9 months without him. I really thought this would get easier.
You watch as the world keeps moving but you’re standing still.
It’s like when I came home from studying abroad in Spain for a semester and everyone knew the new Gwen Stefani song, “This SH*T is Bananas”. As my friends shouted, “B-A-N-A-N-A-S” I stared in shock that they knew the words and I didn’t. They had all still been living and going on with their own lives while I was half a world away.
That’s how grief feels.
How is everyone living while I am still so far away?
This shit is 100% totally bananas.
I often struggle, as I think most do, to respond to people going through a process of profound loss and grief. What can I say, how can I respond in a way that both honors your experience and lends you a little buoyancy in this time? Because that’s what we want to do. We want to reach out and lift up.
I read about your dream and I thought about the number 8 in spirituality. 8 is the number of reaping what you’ve sowed, and of balance, and it’s interesting, but not surprising, that your subconscious–your dreaming mind–has placed your husband in that place, and that you can’t get to it. You’re seeking balance in this time of trouble, and your subconscious sees your husband’s absence as a removal of your ability to balance. The injustice of his absence is a violation of your rightful harvest: he should be here, shouldn’t he?
Yet the 8 is also a number of survival. The 8 is the number of a leader; of someone with drive, discipline, and control. It balances the material and the immaterial. It is the number of compassion, of manifestation of abundance, of truth, of realism: the good and the bad, and the ability to harvest from the bad as well as the good.
And aren’t you doing that! Look at you. Amid your own heartbreak and struggle, you dig deep and share yourself with the heartbroken around you and around the world. And isn’t he the root of all of that? And there he is for you, on the 8th floor.
The truth: You can’t go there yet. But you will. You have all the tools and he is rooting for you. Your balance is there and you will find it.
Energy can neither be created nor destroyed; separation is physical and the physical is painful. But spiritual is eternal and in the spiritual, separation is an illusion.
And a gentle suggestion: the next time that nurse says he’s on the 8th floor, you tell her she’s wrong. You go to the 10th floor–the number of Love and Light–and he will be there. Don’t let that nurse send you anywhere! She doesn’t know squat! Only the two of you know.
Blessings on you and your family.
so sorry for your loss. My heart hurts for you and your daughter