A Month of Dreams, Grief, Birthdays, and Love
In the eighth May without Ana, I’m learning to find her in the stillness.
Dreams
It’s May 3rd and I’m trying to hold onto a dream of my daughter. It’s thirteen days before what would have been her 23rd birthday. I am spiraling towards wakefulness and she is here with me, but I understand she’ll be gone in seconds. I try to tell her how much I miss her and love her and hate that she died. But consciousness descends. Suddenly I am in bed, blinking into the morning brightness. Ana is gone.
In this most magical of dreams, Ana was a child again — maybe 9 or 10 — full of laughter and light. I felt this. I took it in. But I didn’t become lucid until the very end, when my conscious and unconscious psyche faced off, a beat before the former suppressed the latter.
In those few seconds of lucidity, I desperately grasped at the vision of her face which was surprisingly clear and present in my dreaming brain.
The dream was a missed opportunity. I didn’t know it was a dream as I’d watched Ana play and dance and run. I didn’t understand why I’d felt so urgently, persistently sad. She was laughing and I was trying to get her attention. She was buoyed by childish joy and I was distracted by overwhelming sorrow.
