Dancing With Grief

The last couple of weeks have been a wild roller coaster ride, ups and downs, g-force curves, and unexpected twists in dark tunnels. I haven't slept well at all; I fall sound asleep but then wake up and my brain goes into fretty overdrive over things I can't control.

I tell myself it will all be fine, I keep telling myself, it will be okay, it's all just details, just bumps in the road, everything will work out.

Well, yes, everything will work out, but so far it hasn't been easy at all, and just when I least expect it I well up with grief and hoo boy, my throat is crammed with a hundred thousand stones and my eyes are leaking salt water.

I wipe my eyes and breathe and move on to the next task, the next phone call, the next the next the next, one foot in front of the other, one step at a time, breathe, smile, breathe, move on.

Last night I had my first Mom Dream and it was a doozy. I dreamed that Joe and I were at the funeral home -- well, "a" funeral home rather than "the" funeral home -- or a hybrid of the funeral home and nursing home, or something like that, some place that my subconscious conjured up.

Anyway, the workers there had to move some bodies, including Mom's. I saw her there, in the casket, dressed in her pretty white sweater, her hands folded at her waist. As the workers pulled her casket along, she gasped and grimaced, as she did when she was dying. My heart leapt in the dream, thinking maybe she wasn't dead, but the workers saw my astonished face and said, "Oh no, she's dead! That's just a reflex; it happens all the time." And they continued to move the casket and she continued to gasp and grimace, and I kept watching and telling myself she was dead, and then I woke up.

And it was 3:30, or 4:00, or 5:15, or some dark, awful time of the night like that, and I couldn't get back to sleep. I lay there until I couldn't anymore, got up, read my email, and made the coffee.

I thought I was okay. I mean, I could be analytical about the dream; I could think about how odd the dream was and be fine. Bu then at breakfast I told Joe about it and the tears just poured down my cheeks and the damn stones filled my throat again.

But as of today, my work week is almost over. Whew. The day after tomorrow I will be at a weekend-long party, where I will hug a lot of people and play and laugh and dance. I will stay up late so it won't matter if I can't sleep. I think I need this weekend really bad, bad enough to spend money I shouldn't spend, because hugs and laughing and dancing -- they're like cures, they can get you through almost anything.