Dreams – the place for unfinished business
The last two nights I have had a restless sleep, waking up to sounds Tin is making on the video camera, or from nightmares about my family. Most of these weird dreams have centered on my mother appearing, coming over, being front and center but already dead, almost like a zombie in the midst. It’s probably because I’m finishing up unfinished business that relates to her and so her afterlife state is every present on my mind.
When my dad passed, I headed across the Lake from my home in Covington and sat with my mother and brothers and my father dead in the bed waiting on my other siblings to arrive from out of town. He was grey and life-less and that image of him took a long time to burn out of my mind. Similarly, the image of my mother so sick – the emergency calls over the year leading up to her going into the hospital, the profusion of bruises as nearly her entire body was covered with purple and black, the night I took her when her heart was racing out of control and she was jumping all over the place, the look on her face when the drip started and it was then 4 AM and she turned and said to me slumped over in a chair in the emergency room “thank you” while I could hear the woman behind the curtain speaking softly to her mother who was dying of cancer, the smile in mom’s eyes when I’d walk in the hospital room, the crazy talk about her father leaving a wad of cash under the bed for her and for me to scooch down and get it, and her constant rubbing the bed beside her telling me she was “making room for the baby” while the nurses thought she was nuts, but when I told them about the adoptions, they went “oh, that’s what that is”, and her always telling me no matter what time I walked in, “I was just thinking about you, where have you been?” – I want to remember my mom when she was upright, handsome, laughing with that ever present twinkle in her eye – but that too will take a long time to burn back into my mind as being the first images that appear.
For now, mom appears as a zombie, the undead, sitting at the table waiting for the business she left behind to be finished.