Dreams with Daddy
My father sits in a small metal side chair, the kind you find in a hospital room, a blank wall at his back. He wears his Sunday suit, the silver tie he saves for weddings. He crosses his legs, looks at his fingers like I have seen him do a thousand times. Silent, we wait together, for I know not what. I want to lean into him, and I wonder what he is thinking.
Daddy’s fingers are thin and nimble, the skin taut, the kind of hands a doctor needs for his work. I notice he is not biting his fingernails or the skin around them, something he has done most of his life. A tiny thing, but significant, it seems.
We wait together like we used to during my mother’s many surgeries. Broken hips — too many times to count — a knee. Her back. In those times I knew he was worried, so I tried to draw him through it with my chatter — about children, neighbors, work, anything but politics.
This is the first time in many months Daddy has not been lying in a hospital bed, with me trying to keep the one-sided conversation going. I’m talking to him, effusive in my glee at finding him all dressed up and sitting in the chair.
But here’s the thing: It’s a dream. My father died in April.
Right after Daddy died, I was hopeful he would visit me. I climbed in bed each night, wondering when it might be. I had dreamed of others in my life who had died. Why should Daddy be any different?
I was sure he was coming. It would just be a matter of time.
And he did come, swiftly, standing in the front hall of my childhood home in his Sunday suit, next to the mirror, his hair grayer than I remember. I hugged him, feeling such joy at the warmth of him, telling him I knew he would come, and then he melted away.
But he came again, this time sitting in that chair, in the shadows, while the world goes on around him. And that’s where he has been in a half-dozen dreams since. When I see him there I’m overcome with joy. I feel the knot in my throat, thinking I might cry, just watching him sit, in a room that is neither cold nor hot, so thrilled I am, happier than I have felt for a very long time.
And then the alarm startles, the dream fades, and I am back to day, feeling the ache of a world without Daddy in it.
I am a dreamer. Both night and day. Those who know me well know I often don’t hear the conversation, don’t even know anyone is talking to me. Not solely because I have lost some of my hearing, which I have, but rather I am lost in what I am thinking.
Daddy knew that about me. Once, when I was about 9, he called me a liar because I had no idea where my sister was. I didn’t. Had she told me? In my memory, I see her form sliding past me in the family room as she says something. I was lost in a book, until his words stung. Was I that? A liar? Is that all he thought of me? I spent years trying to prove otherwise.
We've been looking at the scriptures of Advent during my writing class at church. We're trying to find where we fit in the story of the virgin birth in the manger with the shepherds and all that.
Since I was a child, I’ve used my dreams to figure out the world.
The ages-old Christmas story takes on a new slant when I read about Joseph, who learns in a dream what he should do with his not-yet-wife-but-oh-so-pregnant betrothed.
So how do I fit in this story? It feels presumptuous to think God is speaking to me in my dreams. Who am I to be that important? Yet Daddy's not the only person in my life who has died but who has come back in my dreams — my mother-in-law, my grandfather, a childhood friend who was not always so nice — and so, I wonder.
In early February, as Daddy lay fighting pneumonia in the hospital where he practiced medicine for 50 years, he told me he would not get better. “You’ll have to take care of your mother,” he said. I knew then would not survive this fight and that this was his directive to be followed. But how in the world would we manage?
In the months since his death, the days and decisions have been dizzying. A new home for my mother, a new town. Our home, an empty shell. And yet, there are days when I’ve almost forgotten he’s not still there, just on the other end of the phone when I call, sitting in his chair with the dog in his lap. Except the number we had my whole life doesn’t work anymore, and only my mother answers the new one.
I don’t want to live in a dream world. I want to be awake and alive. Occupy the now. But it feels like I am waiting for Daddy to say something, when he comes in my dreams. I suppose I am looking for specifics — Joseph certainly got them. Like what do to when Mama won’t take her medicine correctly. Or the intangible, like what heaven is all about. And has he found the dogs, like we asked him to when he was dying, and our grandparents?
I’m looking for comfort, too, that despite the fact that he is not with us anymore, all will be well.
The move was difficult. Watching my mother as her cherished things were boxed up and loaded into the truck proved heart-wrenching. The packers worked quickly, so we worked behind them, gathering up personal items from his desk, tossing some, keeping others. That first afternoon, we found something torn from a magazine in a small catch-all basket on his desk. It was a poem, no given author, that read in part:
You mustn’t tie yourself to me with tears. I gave you my love. You can only guess how much you gave me in happiness.... let your grief be comforted by trust . . . I won’t be far away, so if you need me, call and I will come. Though you can’t see or touch me, I’ll be near, and if you listen, you’ll hear my love around you, soft and clear.
We felt him there, at that moment and knew he had left the words for us to find, right when we needed them most.
So I will keep dreaming, in hopes the next time I need him, he'll show up again and this time be ready to talk.
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To read daily meditations during Advent from the writers of St. Michael's, visit
, and download These Holy Mysteries.
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Santa Baby... Hurry Down the Chimney
I had no idea how to type, wouldn't learn until I was a senior in high school, and even then I didn't think I needed to know how. That was not a skill I would ever use in my career. Typing was for secretaries and such. And the whole typo thing I am so good at? Apparent, even in my very best 8 (9)-year-old cursive. Where was my proofreader, is what I want to know.
But reading this letter to Santa, I got to thinking. (Oh no, not that again) Though there are other things I have avoided this year (many) the BIG THING is owning the whole writer thing (again) and actually doing what I have been talking about doing for a long, long time. I have wanted to be a writer since I was six. I can't tell you exactly why or when, but I can say it might have been because of Hitty, that Newberry Award-winning story about a doll somebody gave me a long time ago. I could never quite get past the first few pages, thinking surely I could write better than this. There were no pictures! Though I hear it has been remastered, whatever that might mean.
And I am a writer. But I have lost that identity along the way of being one, of trying to pay a few bills. So, as I have written before (these questions are beginning to seem very repetitive) what I didn't do in 2010 is finish my funny novel, I think because it is so unlike anything I have ever written before that I am worried about what folks will think of me. (and not just my folks.) And I didn't even pull out the other one I have not finished, the one those "real writers" I know said showed so much promise.
IN 2010: Yes. Too scared too busy too worried too unsure, all of that. Aren't y'all tired of hearing that now? I am. And I'm sorry to repeat myself.
So here we go. The promise: I'll make Santa Claus glad he gave me that typewriter. Now... If I could only find it in all the clutter around here.
Letting Go
December 5 – Let Go. What (or whom) did you let go of this year? Why?
I have been writing my whole life. When I was too young to know better, I imagined myself as a playwright or a poet but never told anybody. Never mind the fact that I didn't know any poets or playwrights, novelists or even journalists, really, it was my dream to string words together into something from the first time I took the storyteller's stool in kindergarten. When I got to college, I actually felt the dream dangling close enough in front of my eyes on occasion to almost grasp it. I wrote about it in my Freshmen journal... "It's that dream again," over and over. My professors said they believed in me. My father said he knew I had a talent and wanted me to go to college to learn how to use it. I can recall exactly where I was at that moment.
Through the years I have had a pretty good grasp of the dream at times. Most people would think that having a book or two published, and hundreds of newspaper and magazine bylines would mean I had finally caught up with the dream, grasping it as firmly as Harry Potter did his snitch, and I would say so, too, at least for awhile. But in the last year, it feels as if I have let that magical snitch go.
Oh, it's hovering... in two novels not fully abandoned but almost. In essays I thought about writing but didn't.
Why? No time.
But really, I'm afraid of finishing.
Afraid my words will not be beautifully strung together like the pearls I imagine them to be. That I won't have anything to say that matters. Afraid it won't matter to anyone besides me when I'm done.
But that should be enough, though, shouldn't it? Because it matters to me.
Taking part in the Reverb10 challenge is a start, one small way to get the snitch hovering in front of me again, teasing me along every day, at least for the next two dozen days or so.
I have always heard that you have to let your children go before you get them back. And so, perhaps, it is the way of dreams. And so I hope that this year's letting go will lead to next year's catching up, that the snitch will hover close at hand again, close enough to grasp it firmly in my hand.
Stuff dreams are made of
In real life, the men in my house have gone off to work, and honestly, I feel like having a parade, maybe even launching a few fireworks. Lately I don't often have the house to myself, and I miss it. Work and winter and a hundred other tugs have kept me from my kitchen window in the mornings, where I can watch my birds, see the blue, yellow-eyed pansies open their faces to the sun, check on my peonies just popping through that hard, cold earth. When I am home on weekends, that's where the boys are — a Saturday husband housebound by rain or snow or frigid temperatures, and a grown son watching Lost, drinking his beer, sleeping late.
But today, let the parade begin. In the past week, Graham has come downstairs before 8 a.m., dressed in his Joe Banks best, on his way to the job — in his career field no less — he landed two weeks ago. He likes it. Though it's in the town he's known since he was 2, the job takes him to parts he's never seen before, so every day he learns a new thing. My husband, who some days dawdles over the newspaper until 8:30, was up and out today, too, leaving me only the boy dog to take my attention. Tomorrow, the beautiful spring day will lure them all I hope to the boat that has been woefully neglected all these winter months.
And so dare to climb the stairs to the 'bat cave' where Graham has been spending his evenings. I throw open the windows, get out the ammonia, try to wipe away the winter blue that has consumed this house.
