Last night I felt your arms around me

[susie_flo]

Grieving is a strange and unpredictable process.  Last night I dreamt that my mother came back...

My sister and I were at her old house sorting through her things, which for some reason were all still there.  I Went to the kitchen to make us some lunch and suddenly the back door opened and mum came in from the back garden, pleased to see me and acting as though everything was normal.  She had just been pootling around outside in her dressing gown and didn't seem to know that she had died 18 months ago.  Just a straightforward wish dream...  I grabbed the unexpected chance to rush over and give her a long hug, which none of us had had a chance to do before she died.  It felt vivid and real.  Nothing in the world is the same as a hug from your mother.  I called for my sister to come in and join us.  Afterwards my sis and I could not work out whether to act like everything was normal, or to try and help her understand that she had died.  Selfishly, I wanted to keep her here, but was afraid of what would happen when we left her alone there and went back to our own lives.  It was hard to wake up and find that she was not really back.

It was only when she died that I fully appreciated the human desire to believe in an afterlife...   the overwhelming need to believe that you can say things to someone who has died, tell them how you felt about them and confess your regrets.  Also the need to believe that they have gone somewhere better, to make up for any pain or loneliness they may have suffered. 

I suppose the only thing we can do is keep the positive things about that person alive in our own behaviour and make sure they are not forgotten.

Comments

[sushidog.livejournal.com]

Gosh, I could have writen quite a lot of this about my grandparents, who died fifteen years ago; I still occasionally "visit" them in dreams; I'm amost always aware in those dreams that they are dead, and that this is just a temporary meeting. It's comforting to see them, but it always makes me feel a bit sad when I wake up and they're not there any more.

I was brought up Catholic, and was in the process of losing my faith when they died; I clung on for several months purely because if anyone deserved to go to heaven, my grandmother definitely did, and I didn't want to believe that she wouldn't get her just reward.

But yes, I have really loving, happy memories of my grandparents,a nd tha keeps them alive for me. And I still do things in my everyday life (like baking,a nd crochet) which connect me with my grandmother; I know she'd be really pleased that I make blankets!

[the-meanest-cat.livejournal.com]

The Catholicism thing is very similar for me.... in my teens I tried very hard to believe and went through a phase of being very devout, but in the end I just could not ignore the growing sense of incredulity that I felt about it all. The desire to believe came back like a whirlwind when my mother died, but even then I could not convince myself to go back there.

It's nice that you keep part of your grandmother alive. I hope you can hand that down to the next geeration. I often ponder the idea of being forgotten... it seems to me to be a major part of the human fear of death is tied in with this. I once read an interesting novella called 'Oblivion', which focused on the second death (or oblivion) which occurs when a dead person ceases to be remembered by any living person. All of the characters were dead and hung around their graves telling each other their stories until each of them faded away to nothingness, at different rates.

In today's world, much of our lives and experiences are recorded and blogged to eternity. I even thought about creating a blog for my mother... It bothers me when I think of all of the 12th century peasants who died and will never be remembered or spoken of. Or babies who never had a chance to make their mark on the world. But I guess it will happen to all of us in time.

For me, a major comfort about death is the idea that our atoms will be re-used back into the eco system, and in that way we remain part of the physical world. I am not at all upset by the idea of my body being eaten by worms and bugs.

[kissmeforlonger.livejournal.com]

It's particularly hard when your feelings about someone were conflicted - I think you probably had that guilt anyway and not being able to see her makes it worse.

That idea reminded me of a short story by Dostoyevsky called Bobok, about a man who wanders round a cemetery and can hear the voices of the recently deceased, which slowly fade away as the body decomposes - there's such an attachment to the idea that people don't just disappear when their physical body dies. I wonder what that's all about. People are fascinated with the past and even those who have been forgotten can be rediscovered - that's one of the pleasures of watching something like Who do you think you are.

[the-meanest-cat.livejournal.com]

That story sounds really similar to 'Obsession'... I wonder if that's where the author got her idea from.

I suppose the answer is just to face up to the fact that we are mere organisms, there are billions of us, and there is no way we can all be personally remembered. I suppose the best we can do is try to create a lasting, positive influence in some way before we go... and hope that the domino effect works.

[moral-vacuum.livejournal.com]

I still get the occasional dream like that about my father 15 years after he died.

I remember one of the early ones where he walked into the kitchen and I was explaining to him that he really shouldn't be there, because he was dead. "Rubbish!" he said. "I was just a bit under the weather". WHich is EXACTLY the sort of thing he'd have said. But I found them comforting rather than freaky.

[moral-vacuum.livejournal.com]

Oh - but never a single moment of believing in an afterlife or wanting to. I was rather proud of my father that he didn't get that either, even when he knew his number was up (being brought up a catholic can ahve that effect, I gather). His rationality was strong to the finish - he'd have been a great fan of Dawkins.