From my dream journal (01/12/22), for those who don’t believe that working on your spirit self and spiritual focus opens doors for a spirit to communicate and that you can actually hear them:

I have never been a skeptic because as a child I always had experiences and while the belief system I grew up in called that, “evil,” I never stopped communicating. I never stopped hearing or seeing. I never stopped believing. In fact, they believed it, too – they just contradicted themselves with double standards like, “spirits are evil,” but, “we worship the Father, the Son (let’s be real, SUN), and the HOLY SPIRIT.” No, I never “let it be,” I just learned to be quieter about it. I have, since my mid-20’s, learned how to speak up again.

My Daddy came to me last night. I didn’t want to wake up, if I’m honest. I never want those dreams to end. They’re few and far between as I continue to heal and grow, so I savor them. This one was different than most, and thankfully not the recurring psychological nightmare that I had for months after he died and that still comes around every so often.

In this one, we were in some strange, very flat place that reminded me very much of the plains, and there were animals everywhere. My father loved all animals, so it makes sense that he would appear in a spiritual way surrounded by them. It was like a cross between Kansas (not “Wizard of Oz” Kansas, more like agriculturally beautiful Kansas) and Noah’s Ark. Very weird to me, that, because my dad loved woods and mountains. “Whatever,” I thought, just being so happy to see him.

He apologized for some things – namely leaving me with the burden that was mama after he died, gave me this motivational speech about not beating myself up anymore and knowing that she was happy there (she was quietly waving from the background, which would in life be be quintessentially my mom if my dad was around) and that my hands had been tied in both situations.

He told me that I had actually fared much better than I imagined that I did. That was something I had needed to hear specifically from him since my mother died, though I hadn’t realized it until I awoke from this dream. I have dealt with a lot of guilt since my mom died, surrounding that. He told me that I was in a place most people don’t find themselves in when he died – young, career and goal driven, raising a child, and managing my mom (which he knew about when he fell into this coma, but hadn’t told me, and I didn’t realize it until she died and I found and read things he had written) while he was, for lack of a better phrase, literally rotting away in the hospital bed.

Bit of backstory: his feet were dead (literally) and about to fall off (metaphorically) when I signed to remove life support. They were scary and disgusting to see – they were freezing cold, solid blue and black because of his kidneys shutting down, and they’d stopped dialysis because they were getting ready to move him to another unit to remove life support, AND YET THEY WANTED TO AMPUTATE THEM.

In this dream he laughed his truest laugh, which had a deep, guttural beginning and ended with a more high pitched, fast paced giggle, and he said to me that he heard me say to the doctor, “are you out of your mind? What’s the point in that? You’re an idiot if you think I’m going to approve of you chopping his feet off when he’s about to die anyway. Why don’t you go fix somebody who can be saved instead of trying to rip off more money from my family and his insurance company? He fought to make it this long with both of his massive, size 15 diabetic feet and he’s managed to keep all but a single toe. You’re not cutting a damned thing off except this ventilator tomorrow so that he can finally be at peace.”

He quoted that to me verbatim, and thanked me for standing up for his feet, semi-pun intended because he was goofy like that with his dad jokes. I forgot I had even said that to that doctor, but upon waking I remembered it vividly and I remember being so angry that they wanted to argue with me about it and my mom wasn’t there. You see, she wasn’t there most of the time after the first day, but I had left only once (even showering in the shower of his CCU room) and when I did leave that one time, I didn’t want to.

It was only because she had asked me to come back to their house to get things FOR HER so she wouldn’t HAVE to leave that I had left, and then she left anyway. She would come for a couple of hours a day. She almost slept through his passing and J had to force her to understand what was happening. I was FURIOUS. I realize now that it was because she was already sick with the late-early stages of dementia then (hence the stuff I later read that my father had been taking notes on), and that’s why the doctors pulled me aside to that cold, dreary “counsel room” with her and told me that I had to make all the decisions and tried to explain that to her. Terrible experience.

I remembered the anger at him not taking care of himself better, in my eyes just willingly giving up his life and that somehow meant he didn’t love me as much as I thought he did. I remembered believing that if he’d loved me the way he had made me believe he did, he wouldn’t have treated himself so poorly. Flash forward to the last couple of years and what I have put my own son through with my health. That’s a bitter pill to swallow.

I also remembered something I didn’t consciously know existed: the resentment I had toward my mom because she thought he was just sleeping and left him for two more hours and when she came back to check, he had seized and stroked and there was no bringing him back after that. They tried. I pushed them. I argued. But I finally had to accept that they couldn’t fix his brain and he was never leaving that CCU bed. After five excruciating days of denial, I had to let him go, and I had to make that decision alone. I realized that I was SO ANGRY at my mother for being the reason we were there and for being sick and making me have to choose.

For what it’s worth, here I will insert the inspirational realization I had and the absolute fact that NO MATTER HOW IN CONTROL YOU THINK YOU ARE OF EVERYTHING IN LIFE, YOU ARE NEVER IN CONTROL OF ANYTHING. PERIOD. END OF STORY. More on that later…I digress.

I remembered so many things when I woke up, details I think I had purposely blocked and I think my dad triggered them on purpose, even though they are SO difficult to think about, because after all of his preaching (sweetly) to me in the dream, he said to me, “when you wake up, turn on the radio and don’t you stop singing, girl. Don’t you DARE avoid the one thing that makes you feel true purpose just because of some certain things you might hear that hurt you! Let the hurt drive you!” He was irritated about that because music had always been our most powerful bonding agent (again, upon waking and considering it, I realized I haven’t made music in three or more months)…and then he sang to me.

I knew he was getting ready to leave me then. He always sings to me right before he leaves me in dreams. He sang the bridge of this old song called, “I’m Moving On,” by Rascal Flatts. There is one lyric that is supposed to go, “And I have made up my mind that those days are gone,” but he sang it, “Girl, make up your mind that those days are gone.”

“Well, I’ve been working on it,” I thought, “but anyway, point taken.” He somehow remixed into “Let It Hurt” as he turned and was walking away. He was apparently on a Rascal Flatts kick (yeah, he listened to stuff besides WDJC – a local Christian only radio station – when my mom wasn’t around…he listened to EVERYTHING, especially musical theater stuff).

Anyway, so I turn on the radio – yes, an actual radio app and not Spotify or Apple Music on shuffle – as I was getting coffee ready and guess what song was playing and barely into the first verse when I chose the radio station and it finally tuned in? Yep. ⬇️

So, there’s that… I listened intently, and of course I shed tears when that certain part of the song arrived, and I sang it just like he had, using the rewording of the lyrics he had used. I went on with my day. I say with it for a long moment.

I showered, I did a few things in the bedroom and moved on to the kitchen where I washed the dishes and cleaned the counters (I do this ritualistically every morning and most nights, now that the kid is older and dirtying so many dishes with his “bottomless pit” eating habits…). And then, I sat down to write this. I listened to the other song Daddy was singing/humming in the dream as he was leaving before I opened WordPress, and I took it in – as difficult as it is for me to listen to that song lately, for a number of reasons), and I cried some more. And as those tears flowed, so did my words begin to…and here we are.

Grief is like a strange and living creature, and it’s grips are never ending once it touches you (though it waxes and wanes in its intensity), but so are those soul connections that we think we can’t live without. Whether we lose them through death or living circumstances, the universe knows what it’s doing. That’s what you need to take away from this post. And, I think that’s where I’ll end this one.

Sit with your grief. Let it do its job. Allow yourself the gift that grief really is, even though you may not realize it’s a gift at all right now… One day, you will make friends with it. Eventually, it will cease to be a monster and become a friendly companion that helps you rather than tortures you. But you have to allow that transfiguration to take place, and in your own time you will…because it is an inevitable process.

I know that if you’re struggling with grief, you’re going to be ok. One day, if you just keep going, you’ll know it, too. You’ll look in the mirror and see yourself and just as suddenly as you didn’t recognize who you were seeing at some point after grief came, you’ll begin to see yourself again, and you’ll realize that all along your grief was there to help you. I know it may sound crazy, but I promise you, it’s true.

“May not be what you want, but it’s what you need
Sometimes the only way around it
Is to let love do it’s work
So go on
Yeah, let it hurt…”

Love to you all.

~C.