“There are more things
in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” (from Shakespeare’s Hamlet)
Both of my grandfathers died when I was sixteen. A few months after each had died, I dreamt
that they had returned to say goodbye.
These dreams were different from other dreams. They were vivid, lifelike, as if I was really
in the presence of my grandfathers. Each
dream was accompanied by my tears and by a deep sense of loss and love. Each grandfather came to say goodbye only
once and never again returned.
My mother died on February 16th, 2010. Her final days began with agitation and ended
with the calming numbness of morphine. I
wished from her a last moment of awareness, a lucid and quotable last thought, perhaps
to tell me that she had glimpsed the other side of life and that there was no
need to fear. But she did not do so.
I have few warm memories of my mother. She was an often depressed and always anxious
person. She kept an immaculately clean
home. She was not demonstrative with
affection. I don’t remember hugs or
kisses. In my household, food, order and
cleanliness were the substitutes for love.
My mother died of complications from dementia. In her last months, she would stand at the
window of her apartment, count the cars in the parking lot and repeatedly
wonder out loud where so many cars came from.
A brief digression while I set the stage. Approximately 8 months after my mother’s
death, while driving at night with my wife, I had an odd and momentary vision
of a deer’s face in the leaves of a passing tree. I thought to myself that this might be what a
hallucination is like, or maybe it was a sign of my old age, with declining
mentation and advancing imagination. It
lasted for only a second and I really didn’t make too much of it. If anything, I was a bit amused by the
spectral vision. A few moments later my
wife grabs my arm yelling, “There’s a deer!”
I got a momentary glimpse of a large buck looking in my direction,
standing broadside across my lane of the road.
This was no hallucination. I hit
the brakes and swerved, missing the buck by a few feet and a few fractions of a
second. Had my wife not been looking
forward at the road, I doubt I would have seen the buck in time to avoid a
serious collision. My wife and I arrived
home safely, both of us a bit shaken by a disaster barely averted.
That night I went to bed and had a dream. My mother came to see me. We were sitting side by side riding in a
car. No one else in the car knew she was
there. But she was visible to me. She was beautiful and serene in appearance,
not withered, gray and demented as my mother came to be in her last years. I asked her to tell me what it was like on
the other side, the side beyond life.
She did not speak to me, but she held me, comforted me, and softly
kissed me as I never remember her having done in life. And in my sleep, I wept as I had not done for many
years. I awoke that morning remaining
sad, grieving for my mother believing, as was true for my grandfathers, that this
too was to be a onetime dream, one time to say goodbye.
I am a psychiatrist, trained in science, trained to
interpret dreams rationally. Freud’s great discovery was that dreams are a
glimpse into our unconscious, an expression of our unfulfilled wishes. The rational part of me tells me to accept
this as the explanation and interpretation of my dreams. But there is a part of my soul that wonders, “what
if?” These dreams of my grandfathers and of my mother were so real, so vivid,
and so different from all my other dreams.
What if these ‘dreams’ were not just the yearnings of my psyche, but
visits from those who loved me, trying to offer their comfort and their
goodbyes? What if my mother was trying to
answer my questions about the other side, telling me she had found a peace and
love in death that she had not known in life?
My
rational self says that this is not so.
But
how do I know for sure?
Maybe,
just maybe . . .
Reason
tells me “not so.”
My
soul cries, “what if?”
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