Dreams and Schemes

I jolted awake from that familiar nightmare.

Back at school, already late, utterly unprepared.

A backpack hangs from my shoulder, but when I unzip it, it’s empty. I don’t know where my classrooms are. The hallways twist into unfamiliar corridors, everyone else seeming to know exactly where they belong while I stand there exposed and lost.

Sometimes I can figure out what a dream means, and sometimes it remains unresolved.

Last night’s dream needed no interpreting.

In the middle of the night, lying awake in the dark, I knew exactly what it was about:

Living unsteadily with mortality.

Lately, I’ve been wondering—something ChatGPT can’t answer for me—how my parents lived so happily at my age and older, knowing they were in the second half of life, headed toward the finish line.

Even after almost seven years of widowhood, and feeling pretty well back on my feet, thoughts of death can still throw me off kilter now and again.

I remember feeling something similar when I was pregnant with my first child. I asked countless mothers what labor was like. I knew it would be painful, but beyond that, there was no way to know.

Expectant mothers don’t know if labor will be manageable or overwhelming, brief or long, peaceful or frightening. We can listen to other people’s stories, but eventually there comes a moment when we simply have to enter the experience ourselves.

With the birth of my second child, I was much more prepared. I trained for it the way a runner trains for a marathon. And I found a better coach than my first husband—who, though a physician, had no clue how to support me. By then we had met my soul-sister friend, Kelly, and she carried us all through labor’s tough hills as well as the easy miles.

I know that if my husband, Malcolm were still alive, I would probably still assume we would both die someday—but someday would feel far away, like it does for most couples.

That’s probably how my parents did it. The reality of loss can’t be fully imagined until it happens.

When Malcolm died, that comforting illusion popped like a delicate bubble drifting into the sky.

I can’t slip back into it.

I’m a seasoned member of the widowhood club now, the Walmart greeter at the door.

Like it or not.

I know too much to unknow it.

Yet there is still so much beyond my understanding.

Last night, it felt like I’d come this far only to arrive at a new school with an out-of-date map.

Some nights I still wake feeling unsteady about this fleeting life in this shell of a body and mind.

I could spend time worrying about how the ending will come. Or I could accept that it will come—as it does for every life—and live this moment grateful for the conscious life I’ve been gifted.

Sometimes that feels easy.

When I’m bathed in loving feelings.

When I’m with people I love.

When I’m consumed by laughter.

Engaged in a project.

Lost in a book.

Or deep in conversation.

Other times, it feels exactly like that dream.

One moment I’m standing on familiar ground. The next, I’ve landed somewhere I don’t recognize. The rules have changed. The hallways are unfamiliar. I have no helpful map.

Like the tumbles the toddler in my life experiences daily.

Some barely register.

Others are devastating. The world she trusted moments before has betrayed her.

Then something shiny catches her eye, pulls her back in, and she forgives the world.

I think that’s what many of us do, too.

We let go of the version of the world we thought we lived in and learn to live in the one that remains—bumps and bruises and all.