My Mother Wakes into Dreams

My mother died in her bed, alone.

The last time we talked she was telling me about her dream and I wasn’t listening.  Distracted, I wanted to get off the phone. Yeah, mom, ok… A few days later I couldn’t reach her.  A few days later I asked my dad to go check on her. A few days later he found her dead in her bed, already coming apart.

I have tried to recall her dream and I can’t, but it must be encoded somewhere in my memory, right?  If I just tug the right thread surely it will come flooding back?  Some mornings I lie with my eyes closed after waking, trying to find my way back to a dream I can’t remember but can still feel.  My mother’s dream is like that for me, but even more distant… a dream of a phone call about a dream that was never mine to begin with.

My mother was many things: she was physically beautiful as a young woman and into middle age; tall and slim with long dark hair and large brown eyes.  She was warm and easy to approach, quick to laugh, and always had an eye out for the underdog or the person alone at the party.  Artistic, witty, intelligent, athletic and graceful- her talents seemed endless.  When times were good, she was a joy to all who knew her.

And there were many good times.

There were also times in my childhood when my mother wore sadness like a deepening of color around her.  Like an aura.  She sat in her chair by the window and looked out at something only her eyes could see.  When I was small I’d see her there and feel the quiet around her like a living thing.  I worried the sadness would kill her. I wanted to save her but I didn’t know how, so I just watched and listened.  My chest would fill with dread as I crept up to her room and peered in, making sure she was still alive.

I checked, but when she was at the window I learned not to approach.  She could be mean then.  Or her loneliness could take on a desperate intensity, bringing childlike weeping and a ferocity of need that scared me.  I approached her instead when she was on her bed.  In our small house, her bedroom was her lair, and her bed was her throne.  On that old double bed, surrounded by her pretty things, she read countless novels, played guitar and wrote country songs that embarrassed me with their raw sentimentality, studied and wrote papers for college, sketched pictures, listened to music, painted her nails, and told me stories.

I wore a groove in the carpet next to her bed, sitting with my back against a chest of drawers and listening to her.  I learned to make her laugh, to listen well, to present an appropriate version of myself -almost clinically neutral- never so positive as to evoke her smothering adoration or her jealousy, never so sympathetic that she’d fold me into her own pain.

She told me stories about how childhood broke her: the ways she was unloved, failed, or used by adults who should have cared for her.  Rape, foster care, beatings, abandonment, rejection, isolation, juvenile detention.  Longing for a father, inability to protect her little brothers, longing for her mother to love her or at least not despise her.

For a time, having young children who needed her and around whom she could center herself satisfied the longing, but as the kids grew her loneliness and sense of loss grew, too.  She didn’t know who to be, because she learned early on that she was nobody.  She wanted more from marriage than my father gave her, and her resentment haunted our house like a specter. She said to me often: I could die alone in my bed and no one would find me for days. Later she had affairs and finally left so she could be free, only to go into free fall.

Years later and living states apart, we talked often.  I’d call while cooking or on a long drive, and we’d talk about nothing and everything.  Many times she told me about her dreams- they were more real than waking life, she said.  Recurrent dreams, a beautiful house and her three children, small again.  Sometimes a fourth.  And a man who loved her.  Mundane things happened, routines, circadian rhythms.  And the bitter disappointment of waking again into this life because it had seemed so REAL.  It was if in sleep the longing subsided and she glimpsed the life she could have had if she’d felt worthy. 

The last time I talked with her she shared another dream.  Her speech animated, something important to convey.  I remember that, but I don’t remember the dream.  The phone call had gone on too long and I had more important things to do.  Oh the terrible irony- what I wouldn’t set aside now to spend those minutes listening to my mother one last time. 

In the days that followed, the silence grew and my chest began to fill with familiar dread.  Blinded by distance, I checked on her impotently: calls, voicemails, emails, texts. Reluctantly my dad agreed to the cross-town drive, recounting the last time this happened when he’d found himself stuck in an awkward encounter with his very much alive but inexplicably cocooning ex-wife.  I tried to reassure myself that it would be another false alarm, another walk down the hall to peer into her bedroom and find her swallowed in sadness but alive. 

But this time she did die alone in her bed, and no one found her for days.  I never did learn how to save her. I pray she woke into her dream, surrounded by love.