Monday, February 11, 2008

Sleeping to Dream About You

Sometimes I sit here and think, "Just write, whatever comes out may actually make sense. Work it out!" Ok, here goes. What's on my mind?

My dreams are super vivid lately, which is good and bad. Good because I can feel things (my father hugging me) and bad because those things are no longer real (my father hugging me). I dream about my hometown, places and things I haven't thought about in ages (the Provident Bank on the corner of 60th and Broadway, for example). I dream about things that could never happen (ok, it is possible that I could go to the Oscars someday, but highly unlikely that I would be attending as Javier Bardem's date). I dream about things that have happened in life, only in the dreams they are happening in a different way. I used to have deja vu in my dreams, which is different from recurring dreams (I have those too). I know, deja vu in a dream...weird.

I think I dream about my father regularly, but I can't be sure. Hard to explain. Sometimes I'll wake up and not remember the dream right away, but later in the day, it will hit me...Daddy. Other times, I'll know I'm dreaming, even though it feels real, and I'll start to cry, because it's still too hard to say goodbye even in a dream. I usually wake up all stuffy and puffy from the crying. Occasionally, he's there, but in a very vague way. The dream is vivid, I sense his presence, but I don't see him. Not a ghost, but just a feeling. Or maybe I'm not remembering as well. I'll think, "Did I have a dream about Daddy last night?"

You know what has me on this grieving and dreaming thing? It just hit me.Kanye West performing at the Grammy's. He sang a song for his mother. "Last night, I saw you in my dreams. Now I can't wait to go to sleep" It made me cry, which is easy, but still, it caught me off guard. I'm not a fan of Kanye's by any stretch, but I felt for him. Whatever you want to say about his pomposity or bad attitude or whatever act he's putting on for the cameras, the guy still lost his mother. And until you've experienced that kind of loss, there's no way of imagining how a person feels. Everyone expresses grief differently. Some of us cry in private and never show a single soul how we feel, some of us write it all down and post it on the web and some of us tell the world from the stage of the Staples Center. No matter what, it's still private, if that makes any sense.

Whenever I hear about someone losing a family member, it wrecks me a little inside, especially if the person had a long illness. I guess I go back to the moment in my own life, the emotions I went through. Relief that he would no longer suffer, disbelief that he was gone, the overwhelming sadness that came with knowing I would never hear his voice or his laugh, guilt that I could have, should have done more and regret that I would never be able to share certain things with him. It's awful, and I don't think it ever goes away. But I do find some comfort in my many (mostly hilarious) memories of my father. And as long as I can see him in my dreams, I know I'll be ok.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

After my father died, my college professor called to talk to me. He told me of when his mother died when he was my age at the time.

He also said to do myself a favor, and don't try to get over it, because you never will... and you're really not supposed to.

It goes through me like earthquakes and I just let it. I think about him every day.