I dreamed that my mother was talking to me. She wasn’t saying anything of consequence. I think she was recommending some type of insurance. This wasn’t unusual. My mother was an intensely practical person. She was impatient with talk of philosophy or religion or politics. She put her faith in everyday competence and real things. Most of our conversations were about what she was doing, or what I was doing, sprinkled with nuts and bolts of practical advice. Like that I should remember not to use cruise control if I were sleepy, or I should not keep too much money sitting around in a checking account not earning interest…
This conversation was like that. And I wasn’t paying attention to what she was saying, I was just trying to figure out who she was. Because I knew that my mother had died a year ago, and she couldn’t be talking to me.
“Who are you?” I asked bluntly.
“Why I’m Carolyn Longstreet.” she answered.
Then she stopped talking. I realized then with some desperation that my question had made her remember too. She was dead. She could not be talking to me, and she left.
I had two more dreams that morning. They are far more jumbled. They were dreams in which I was not behaving well. I was impatient with other people, I was either refusing to do something or refusing to even talk to them. And I was using my mother as the excuse. I can’t do it now, I told them. Not while I’m mourning my mother. In my second dream, I was talking to someone that I did not know very well, who should not be expected to cut me any slack. But, unexpectedly, this comparative stranger reacted by breaking out into tears as well, and I felt guilty, and dishonest.
After I got up, the dream refused to leave me. I found myself sniffling in church, wondering what it meant, and decided to come home and write about it so that I could perhaps let go of it.
There was an obvious answer. It was Mother’s Day, and my mother had died a little over a year ago. I was thinking of her. And when I remembered her, I remembered her as she mostly was in life, talking to me, on the telephone, about inconsequential things, like mothers and daughters do.
Some people frequently see their dead parents though dreams. That has not happened to me. Seeing my mother in the dream was a rare thing for me.
Last spring, my mother died. She died on the way to attend a memorial service that we were holding for her mother. My grandmother had died in the winter and we had delayed the service so that my mother could be there.
My grandmother’s memorial service could have been an occasion for celebration as well as sadness. She had died at the age of 98, after living a long, healthy, and mostly happy life. I spent a great deal of my childhood at her house, and she was almost a second mother to me. She had a quiet sort of strength and wisdom. She rarely gave unsolicited advise, and when she did, I always took it. My mother and my aunts and I all relied on her for emotional strength. Her last years were very difficult. She lost her sight, her hearing, and then her memory. She lost everything except her robust physical health, which denied her that only thing she sought; death. She spent her last years fading, an unhappy shell of her former self. I cried inconsolably on the too infrequent occasions that I visited. While this was happening, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer that had metastasized to her bones. It was a very frightening time, because we were all watching my grandmother suffer a lingering death, and were terrified that my mother’s death would be worse. That did not happen. Although my mother experienced her share of pain, fear, and depression during her last three years, she was able to stay on her feet and stay optimistic. She thought she would have a couple more seasons when a surprise bout of pneumonia took her within a day. She died halfway to the memorial service, in an emergency room with her husband and her son holding on to each of her hands.
And I was left within the space of three months trying to cope with both the loss of my mother and my grandmother, and looking for something that would help me.
Neither my mother or my grandmother had ever talked much about religion. They were very faithful church goers, but I do not think that either held much stock in anything that they could not see or hear or hold.
Oddly enough, shortly after my mother died, I had a dream where someone sat and told me that my mother was a young soul, and that my grandmother was an old soul, and I found it inordinately comforting. The Hindu religion holds that everyone has an immortal soul, and that this soul must return to earth time after time again to mature, and to eventually achieve a state of nirvana. Young souls are vigorous and seek sensation and pleasure, and this is fine, as this is what the young do. Old souls have achieved hard earned wisdom and serenity though their many, many lives.
This comforted me because the only “religion” my mother ever talked about was reincarnation. I don’t know if she had any real belief in it, or whether it was just sort of a parlor game she played with her sister. Still, she told us all about the books written by Edgar Casey. In these, he claimed that people meet the same souls over and over again, in each life, and that each time they try again to work things out. My mother’s and my aunt’s lives were fairly placid back then, and they told us that they must be in a “rest life.”
Mourning is an strange thing. It strikes at you in odd times and places. Something trivial, like the sight of apricots, which my mother was particularly fond of, remains me that I can no longer please her by buying them, and I want to cry right there in the supermarket. And I feel guilty about it. It was a year ago, and I don’t want to burden anyone with my unresolved feelings. But when I don’t remember my mother often enough, I feel even worse. I feel guilty when I mourn, and I feel guilty when I forget to mourn.
I don’t think my mother was talking to me in my dream. And I don’t think she left me because I did not recognize her. It was my dream. I was talking to myself. I was first remembering her, as she was, and then, in mid-dream, remembering that she was no longer. Then I mourned for my loss, and felt guilty that by concentrating on myself and my own grief, I was ignoring my other duties and obligations.
Maybe I needed another dream conversation with my mother. I think she would have asked for news of my children, and reassured me that it was OK with her if I moved on. I don’t think she would have spent much time in mourning anyone. She believed in serving the living and getting on with what needed to be done. She would be happy that her husband has found a new companion and some measure of happiness. She would want me to spend my time and energy on my husband and my children.
But, if my mother’s soul still exists, and if she were right about reincarnation, she has moved on and is not hanging around talking to me in dreams. In life, my mother was a bit of an athlete. In her adolescence, she loved baseball, and she spent her retirement playing golf and square dancing. I picture her soul shedding the sick body and rejoicing in being reborn. If she passed from one life right into another, she would be about a year old right now. She would have discovered the joys of wriggling her hands and feet, and perhaps started to take her first tentative steps. Actually, if she were my mother, she would be beginning to run. She would once again be a young soul, in a young body, bold and eager to take on the world. She would not be looking back. Maybe my grandmother is somewhere in that picture too, an old soul waiting to help my mother though another life.
This Mother’s Day, I was not going to write another article about my mother, or spend the day in tears. I was not going to indulge my grief. But I guess my dream really meant that while my mother may be gone, I have not forgotten her. And on this particular Mother’s Day, and every Mother’s Day hereafter, I will remember her love and cry when I need to.
“Mother’s Day the Year After” by Carol Ane Woodard was originally published in THE FOXBORO REPORTER Thursday, May 24 2001 titled “A daughter comforted by Mother’s Day the year after”
