He's D-E-A-D, DEAD

Two weeks ago, on our third morning of our vacation with my family, I dreamt about Charley. Even as I woke myself up from it around four in the morning, the details of it were fuzzy, indeterminate, and I couldn't really remember what exactly happened in the dream. But the gist of it was clear.

My dreams about Charley often fall into one of two categories. The first is generally mundane, often entertaining, or else rather nonsensical. He's not dead, per se, or else I'm not widowed; he's just in the dream, alive, a character amongst other fantastical or boring details, like any other character in the dream. Widowhood and death have no role in that dreamscape.

The second category, however, is usually more bothersome. Typically centered on some emotional, gut-wrenching version of reality and the feelings I've had to survive over the last four years of widowhood, they have some variation on a common theme. Charley was dead (or at least I thought so) but then he's back somehow, with confusing conspiracy theories how I could have completely believed that his death was real but all a huge cover-up or mistake. Or else he left me for another woman, another family, abandoned Anna and me, etc., etc., and didn't want us anymore; he never died, but the feelings of loss and abandonment were the same as in real life. Or...or....There seem to be an infinite number of variations on the same theme, and regardless of the details, earlier in grief they often set off a very bad day for me, the dreams hard to shake in my waking state. Over time I came to describe them as nightmares because, even though they weren't scary or frightening exactly, they were extremely horrifying and upsetting, far scarier than my old, prewidowhood nightmares ever could have been.

I've had so many different flavors of the Charley Nightmare that I often don't even remember what happened in the dream when I wake up, except that it was another of the usual plot line. I know I had one shortly after I moved into this house in early April; I may have had others since then, but if I did, none major enough to actually remember upon waking or over time.

But I had another one while we were on vacation two weeks ago. With our almost-five-year-old daughter plastered against my side, hogging my pillow and abandoning "her" half of the double bed we were sharing, I woke up in the wee hours of the morning, fresh from another reoccurrence of the same old dream. Yet again, he'd never actually died, but he had some supposedly plausible reason how what happened in my real, waking life was a misunderstanding. It had been four years in the dream but apparently he was wanting to come back to us--a bit of a change from the norm in these dreams. I think he'd become disenchanted, gotten older, tired of his new running-from-life normal and living on pennies just to have a new, easier life separate from us for four years. But instead of my usual reaction in the dreams--scared, sad, distraught, desperate to have him back (in short, an emotional mess)--this one was slightly different. This time I was pissed. At him. And for the first time in these dreams, there was a new tangent: if he was the type of man who'd leave us and willingly let us suffer through the last four years of grief and widowhood, who'd let his baby daughter grow up without her father by his own choosing, then he wasn't a man I wanted back. I wanted a divorce.

This dream wasn't as nightmarish as they usually are. I woke myself up from it out of habit, but it wasn't as disturbing as in the past. Even as I groggily registered the time on the clock and that I had approximately 13 linear inches of the bed's width (Anna all the rest), I remember being rather pleased with myself and relieved that I was finally making some progress in my dreams, starting to cleave myself from Charley or else the pain of the last four years, little by little chipping away at the pedestal on which I placed my past, my Happily Ever Before, and realizing over time that my past cannot coexist with my present. I cannot have both.

The dream I had during vacation wasn't as memorable as other prior incantations of it. But it's still been pressing close to the back of my mind since then, lingering as I continue to process and think about it at times.

And it's only almost 7 am right now, but I've been awake for probably an hour or two already, rolling back and forth in my bed, unable to go back to sleep after yet another night with variations on the same dream with Charley. I can't help but wonder if Anna's birthday set me up and off for another one.

I think I fell asleep after snuggling with her for a while at her bedtime tonight, and then I stumbled into my room, falling onto my bed without getting into my pajamas or turning off the light. And I first woke up around two in the morning or so, waking up to a lit room and trying to run through the script of how I'd explain to Anna how her father was actually alive after four years and how...I didn't know exactly what, but there was something I'd just promised Charley in the dream that I'd say to her, to help her understand how her father was now back again and wanted to be a family again.

I blearily blinked at my bedside lamp, my closet, my pillow, trying to hold onto what had just been so real but that I already couldn't really remember. But for a few seconds, a few minutes, or maybe longer, my brain was blending myth and reality into an all-too-bizarre concoction. My waking self was trying to take hold, trying to tell me to get up, go to the bathroom, brush my teeth, get in my PJs...anything to just WAKE UP, to remind myself that whatever was in my brain at that moment was. not. real.

I don't know how long my half-awake fugue state really lasted, but it wasn't until I was sitting on my toilet (sorry if that's TMI =) ), staring at my white shower curtain, before I finally realized that I was awake, that I'd had another dream. The dim light was too bright, the white curtain was too white, and I was far too disoriented. I quickly washed my hands, brushed my teeth, put on my pajamas, and burrowed myself into my still-warm covers, the line between sleeping and waking still too hazy. I couldn't remember what I'd just dreamt about Charley, but I knew from experience that I didn't really want to remember, nor did I want to go back to sleep and fall back into the same dream (or another variation of the same) again.

He's dead, I reminded myself. He's dead. Dead, dead, dead. I made myself draw to mind the image, seared in my buried memory, of him lying dead on the table at the funeral home, the feel of his cold, marble skin under my trembling hands. His broken cheekbone, the plastic under his clothes, the slight tilt to one side of his lips--a pale shadow of the wry half-smirk he so often characteristically had in life. Forced myself to remember the one irrefutable fact I have that I'm not deluded, that Charley really and truly died, that there is no possible way that he could be alive, that my dream was just that--a nonsensical dream.

There's a woman at my support group who has never been able to recover her husband's body, in the six-and-a-half years since he...what? Died? Disappeared? Since he went out snowshoeing on a mountain, got caught in the worst blizzard in years, and whose body has never been found? There's no question that he died, that he couldn't have survived. And we constantly remind this woman that, as difficult and challenging as our separate, individual horror stories of widow- and widowerhood have been, that not having a body is still somehow worse. I know I constantly struggled with the sudden nature of Charley's death, that I wasn't there when it happened, that I didn't get to see his body for two very long days after he died, that I couldn't really understand how this all happened, the surreal feelings that it was happening to someone else. I think it's one of the legacies of a sudden, accidental death versus a terminal illness or a medical condition; Charley was alive and then suddenly, with no warning or witness, he was gone. And the only thing I have to link the two was the 45 minutes I spent with his cold, refrigerated body in the funeral home two days after he died. The first and last time I got to see him after he simply didn't come home one night after a bicycle race.

And as macabre and jarring as it really is some nights, that image of his body at the funeral home--dead, unquestionably dead--is all I have to reassure myself that I really am awake, that I haven't traded one fading nightmare for a newer, fresher one. And even though those 45 last minutes with him were truly the hardest moments of my entire life, I'm so incredibly grateful for them every day, so that I can know, truly, that I'm not crazy.

I'm just grieving.