Simply Blessed

I’ve been thinking lately that night dreams are my final frontier in consciousness.  They fascinate me and I wonder if they might be a link for us between the physical world and the non-physical, Spirit world.  Or as Susie called it in The Lovely Bones, the Inbetween.

I dream every night vividly.  Last night before I went to sleep I was thinking about my Mom who died in 1988.  Macabre thoughts perhaps about whether her body deteriorates even though its embalmed.  Thoughts of that moment when I was saying goodbye to her, as she lay in a coffin, and just had to reach out and touch her hand one final time.  I cringed and quickly withdrew my own hand as I felt her cold, hard skin.

Last night in my dreams, we have moved into another house again, something we so far seem to do about every five years or less.  Even in my youth we moved around quite a bit.  So once again another move, but this time it’s back to the first home I ever purchased.  I bought it about a year after my Mom died.  She had never seen it, my home, my first “real” home.

There are boxes everywhere.  We are in the living room and there’s a lot of talk with the kids about their first day at a new school.   The front door slowly swings open and my Mother walks in.  I know that she’s visiting us from the Spirit world and I yell out to the rest of the family that my Mother is here.  She takes a seat on a couch.  There are boxes cluttered all around her.  I sit outside the ring of boxes that seem to surround her.

My Mother then comments how she has finally come to see me: “I’m so close you could touch me but you don’t, you let the boxes be in the way,” she says.   “Here’s your chance and isn’t it interesting that you let the boxes get between us.”  I tell her, “oh my gosh, you are right, what am I thinking, let me move the boxes.”

I clear a space and I sit down beside her.  Yes, here is my chance.  My Mother has only ever played small bit parts in my dreams, almost as an aside.  Now here she is playing a central role.

I look deeply into her eyes, they’re bright and dark and luminous just as I remember them.  Her eyes are the darkest brown, so dark, they remind me of the color of dark chocolate.  I take her hand in mine and run my hand slowly over hers.  It’s warm, soft and smooth.

She’s wearing a navy blue suit, large lapels and buttons the size of small saucers.  I note that her outfit is circa 1970s.  The decade when she would have been in her 40s still wild around the edges, still relatively young and most of all, free of the medical label she would later have pinned to her.

I see that she has two necklaces on.  One is a rhinestone necklace and the other necklace extends long down her chest and at the end of it dangles a small golden whistle.  I reach out to touch it.  “It’s a God whistle,” she tells me; “I use it whenever I need God.”  “I want one,” I say to her.  And the next thing I know, I’m awake and the dream is over.

I could analyze the dream “to death” if I wanted to but I don’t.  I love living in the questions and not having all the answers.  I love final frontiers that are never conquered.  I love, as my friend Kim says, being alive in the mystery.  I love that I get to be alive and live in the mystery of it all.

I love you Mom, the path is clear now, no more boxes to get between us.  Your fair skinned hands — they are warm, soft and smooth, that’s what I take back with me.  It’s the gift you left for me in the Inbetween world of my dreams, that, and a small golden God whistle.

And now, I’m off to find my own God whistle.  It’s what we’ll share now.  It’s my forever link to you Mom.