At play in the fields of the Lord

My mother visited me last night; a feat in and of itself since she’s been dead now for a year and a half. I’ve surprised even myself since she died because I’m about the only one I know of who she hasn’t come calling on in one way or another. I would have though of anyone, I’d be the one who would most fully feel and see my mother in the everyday waking world since I think I’m so open and accepting of that kind of non-logic but in reality, when Amber left the building, she left the building. Even when I went looking for her, she wasn’t there. I was beginning to resign myself to a life without her, even in my dreams, feeling somehow my wiring wouldn’t let me pick her up, even though in my mind, I was ready and willing for however she wanted to appear. Leave it to her to pull a trick like last night when I didn’t even realize I was dreaming or having the visit.

Though the dream is twisty and convoluted in the way dreams usually are with people melting into others and strange, cryptographic symbolism that I can’t figure out (the bridesmaids in her wedding were all told the theme was “greed” and came with soot on their faces and bobbed hair cuts with the ends dyed blue), the important part to realize was that I didn’t know I was dreaming which is rare for me. I can usually tell when I’m wrapped up in a dream, though I still can’t do much about it and suffer plenty with running in place scenarios and those kinds of things. But last night I was enjoying her wedding, her fourth one, and to a previous long-time boyfriend who in her living years she never married and who, coincidentally, died several months after her from the same lung cancer she did. Yes I found it strange she was dressed in periwinkle since she’s always been more of a violet-lover but the wedding was nice and everyone was happy and nothing seemed out of place. I spoke to her afterwards as she was sitting with her new husband, asking where they were going for their honeymoon. She told me Marti Gras and that’s when something changed for me. I told her that Marti Gras was in late February or early March and it’s only September. Was she sure they were going to Marti Gras? She couldn’t be going to Marti Gras because that doesn’t make sense and then the dream started to melt and she just looked at me and smiled and I seemingly woke up…on a train with my Dad. I was still trying to shake off the confusion about the honeymoon but I was even more confused as to how I’d gotten on a train and where we were going and how I couldn’t remember anything in the past. It was disconcerting in a way that had me starting to panic because my Dad just couldn’t answer me. I kept asking him how I got there and he kept asking me how I couldn’t know, so I got up and started to walk the train aisles and that’s when I found my Mom, standing around one of the corners, looking like she was waiting for me, and that’s when I knew she was gone and I was being visited. She looked the same as she always did to me, petite, tanned, thick, wavy brown hair and she was smiling.

“But you’re gone,” I said.
“Oh honey,” she snickered like the joke was on me. “It’s ok, you’ll get over it.”

And then she put on a big, wide brimmed straw hat with a purple bow tied around it and walked off down the train. Strangely, she’s not really a hat person.

I woke up just as the alarm was going off this morning, feeling like I’d gotten the best kind of visit because it wasn’t sorrowful and it wasn’t full of despair or relief or even the feeling that it was other-worldly. It felt like her playing a fun little trick: let’s show Beau something he’d like only to be ruined by my anxious curiosity to make sure everything was right and sensible, blowing the illusion away to reveal my Mom, as she had always been: humor and insight and exasperation with my never-ceasing anxiety fully intact. She always thought it was funny and a little sad at how worked up and over-wrought I’d become over the littlest, stupidest things. I was much too high-strung for her but of course, she smoked a lot of pot so a lot of people seemed that way to her, I think. Regardless, the visit was a pleasure for me. One of those rare treasures to put away and look at every now and again if for no other reason, then to remind me I’m not really as cut off from her as I think.