Thursday, May 19, 2011

Journal 19 Visits

I dreamed of my father's father, my grandfather, the other night.

I don't dream of him often, he was not in my life long (he died when I was 8, twenty-nine years ago this past St. Patrick's Day).

I usually regard dreams from those departed from my life as 'visits', and I know this is not necessarily the case. But as I age and seem to tap into the more invisible side of life, the 'other' side of life, and not in a new-agey-weirdo-kind of way, but in a true, more visceral, more viable, more believable way; information seems determined to come to me in non-traditional forms, or in ways I would not necessarily been able to understand before.
I dream about dates, times, I pick up another book from the library, another memoir, and barely read the back of the book, the description. Only when I get home, and am reading the book in bed, through a haze of tears, that the writer died of cancer, a short while ago, a scant couple of years ago, in her early 60's. How? I only read the forward. Then the afterward. Just like a looming deadline, one you can't meet or face, I have yet to read the body of the book.

I still email with my father daily. He's tired alot now, and he makes typos in his emails that I know are not careless, rushed typos. It's his hands...even his hands are tired now. Of picking out the letters on the keyboard. Once, on another set of keys, he entertained our family for hours, for many fun Saturday nights, his piano-playing, singing to the Beatles...
I've cried alot tonight, one of many many nights I've spent alone in the last couple of months. From work to home I go, pick at some dinner, pick up a book, an ice pack for my inflamed sinuses, and then I am usually on the couch or finally, in bed, when the feelings drop onto my chest, slamming into me, making it difficult to breathe.
The headaches that have become a part of my interior landscape, for weeks now, feel like they have a source in the suppression of emotion. They render me helpless, energy-less, the sound of a siren out the window is agony, my entire face seems to swell with the pain in my head.
I don't make it into a big thing. I know that this pain is fleeting, and despite my presence in this stage of my father's journey, he ultimately makes it alone. This world, and all in it, will be left behind, and that is something that on the most basic level, I truly do not have to face for myself, not right now. As I said in my Easter post, I've only just absorbed the fact of my own demise, to come one unexpected day. But I don't have to face it daily, each time I draw a ragged breath in, or watch the sun creep through the blinds.
I picture the man on the bench in Central Park, his eye catching mine, his sad expression imprinted on me. I hear that voice on the subway, no person to attach it to, that I could see, singing that random, far-off line. I curl up on the bed of my life and wait for the next dream, the signal, the one that make me jump up, that will somehow rid me of this feeling, right now, of being haunted.
I go back to that poem, posted on my blog a few months ago..."normal day...let me be aware of the treasure you are..."
I'm trying.

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