It was after my mother’s funeral that I began having dreams of her, usually bossing me around or telling me I was doing things wrong. So life-like.
In the very first dream I had of her, she was like she had been at about 80, before her dementia was obvious, but in retrospect, her symptoms had begun. She held out a piece of paper, flapped it at me, irritated. We stood next to a bed, and I could see that the person in the bed was also my mother, but withered and a boney characture of my mother, like she had been when she died.
I knew that the younger Lillian thought that the woman in the bed was her mother, my grandmother. She was shaking this paper at me- words written in her hand- and insisted that I sign my name to the paper. A contract. I asked her what the paper said and sat myself on the sofa that had been hers since divorcing my dad in 1964, the sofa I slept on throughout her illness and that was now mine. The garish golden flowers needed a modern recovering. Even in my dream, I was aware of changing what had been hers to make it mine.
Her tone was hard and demanding and she said it was a list of how I was to burry her mother and then do “the same for me when the time comes.” I didn’t say anything at first, but refused to take the paper. She shook it in my face. She was the mother of my childhood! Seldom pleased and forever scolding. Her rewards were, to me, arbitrary. I found no pattern.
Seated in my dream, I was looking at her directly, eye to eye. It was a dark, cold pair of eyes meeting mine.
“Mom,” I said gently, like to a child, “you’d better sit down.” Forced, but as sweet and kind as I could manage, like when she was sick and couldn’t understand how to eat with a fork anymore, I said, “This might be a shock for you.”
She sat next to me and her face changed as she did. Now she was the woman who’s mind ticked down. My mother who became a child, then a baby. The mother who could no longer think without help, who trusted me and needed me and thanked me for helping, though she didn’t quite know who I was. She was fearful and yet aware that I was doing her good, not ill.
I said, “Mom, that’s not your mother.”
“It’s not?”
“No, it’s you.”
Understandably she was confused. “Me?”
Touching her arm in hopes of reassurance I said, “You’re already dead, Mom. You have been for a few months now.”
“I am?” She sounded like a bewildered child who wakes from a nightmare and the parent says: You’re awake now, Dear. Don’t be afraid. Except I was telling her: You will only dream from now on, Mom, and you are alone.
Trying to take it in, “Really?” She searched my face for a hint of doubt.
Next in my dream I told her I could not do what was on the paper. “It doesn’t matter anymore. It’s too late.”
My mother changed into the post-therapy woman of around 70, confident that (finally) she had life licked, but also humbled by self-awareness. Her voice lightened and this well-version of my mother chuckled. “Well I’ll be darned!” a saying she often used and added to it a smile that said she could find the strength to bear anything, because she always had. “How about that.”
Even when the joke was “on her” my mother could be a Good Sport. She believed that everyone (especially herself and her daughter) ought to accept cold hard facts with courage and dignity-if they were True. She was the arbitrator of Truth and Lies until she got sick, then I became the adult and told her “There’s no one stealing your teeth, Mom. I’m not poisoning you with your blood pressure pills, Mom. No Mom, you can’t use the sharp knife; let me help you with your toast.” Now, in my dream, I’m telling her she’s dead. (Or, as my therapist would say, I’m telling myself she is dead.) I wished we could have talked longer but she faded away. She took the news well and stayed dead ever since.
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