Messages from lost loved ones
You might think I’m crazy, but I think my dad came to visit me after he died. It was a couple years after his death in the early morning hours of my birthday. We talked for a couple hours and he left because I needed to get some sleep. I woke up in the morning in a state of absolute euphoria because I had gotten to visit with my daddy.
I was close to my dad. I was closer to my son. So when my son died I really, really thought he’d vis
it me too and I was crushingly disappointed when that never happened. I had dreams where he told me we were so close that visiting me would only prolong the pain and he wouldn’t do that to me. What can I say?
I’m almost twelve years out from his death. I celebrated the 10th anniversary of his death by completely crashing over the fact my life was still so totally stuck after his death, a situation I might add has not improved in the almost two years since.
So what did I get for my birthday this year? A god awful dream about my son where he disappointed me with his choices to favor his drug “friends” and I jumped him about it while he calmly told me he hadn’t let me down. I woke up the morning of my birthday completely disturbed, confused, and depressed.
And the dreams keep repeating almost every night for two weeks.
I have chosen to remember my son for all the wonderful things about him and it’s like the dreams are trying to slap me in the face with the reality of how really not wonderful things were at the end when he had spiraled deeply into prescriptive drug use to kill the pain of his life.
It’s given me the awful feeling I’ve been lying to myself and there wasn’t any love and caring. I know this to be untrue, but when you deal with a drug addict you have a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in your life whether you want it or not. He’s the loving child you raised on minute and an abusive monster the next. It was a nightmare.
Fate seems determined to add to the confusion. I was working on something yesterday and needed to make a drawing to figure it out and grabbed a spiral notebook to draw in. As I was walking out to the garage I was flipping the notebook open and it fell to a note from my son’s girlfriend that I had never seen before.
Almost twelve years and I get ambushed with new material. The note was probably from shortly before his death and spoke to his insecurity – she was asking him to go apply for a part time job at a computer store and telling him he shouldn’t be nervous.
Absolutely brilliant young man and he didn’t have a clue how special he was. Drug use had stolen it from him.
I flipped the page and in his handwriting was the phone number for the Spokane police department, which told me he was probably toying with doing something spiteful to his father who had moved to Washington. God only knows what he thought he could tell them that would cause his alienated father problems, but there’s no doubt the intent was to inflict hurt.
It all feels like a knife in the heart when I thought I was past being mortally wounded. The worst part is the doubt. Have I deluded myself and made a palatable fairy tale that I can live with and my psyche is poking me with reality?
I don’t know why it’s happening, all I know is it feels terrible and I don’t understand why it’s happening now. I’m trying to make sense of it. Trying not to allow it to drag me down into deep depression that I hear calling for me. I wish I knew what my brain or subconscious is trying to tell me…
