The dreams lately have been really bad. I've always had very vivid, bloody, grotesque dreams, ever since I can remember, and I can remember early on, from about the age of three. I used to think they were signs that I was insane, but now I suppose they come directly from the source of my supposed insanity. Usually my mother and father are key figures in these dreams. Lately in the dreams I'm being forced to put my rotting father in his grave, and my mother is tagging along with me, speaking nonsense and being blank.
After I watched my father die, I lost some of my fears. Death was scary. I lied to my family members and told them he went peacefully, because why tell them how bad it was except to create more fears for them. The gasping, the gasping was really scary. The two nurses that were there with me and him at the end were very supportive and calm, and they helped me hold my shit together. In that moment of his death, though, I was a little girl and he was daddy. Maybe that was worse than the gasping.
I'm no longer scared of ghosts, though. The things that go bump in the night always terrified me when I was young, and now I can't really envision them scaring me more than watching my father die. The dreams are really bad, though. I try not to be scared of them, because how can I do anything but endure them? Sometimes, I wake up and feel like I'm walking in a fugue until the fog of the dream subsides. Is this what insanity is, to accept that when I close my eyes at night I will see terrible things?
No, Bess, this is NOT "insanity." It's "you" processing his death. If this is the first death you've attended it can be really traumatic especially if you have never experienced this before. The gasping you're hearing? That's normal. He was sedated and moving into the beginning of a coma-like state as the body's systems "shut down" so he was not "struggling" internally as it appeared externally. The normal clearing of the throat, swallowing saliva we do bibty times a day and we're not aware of stops as this process continues; hence, the gasping sounds. I know you took care of him through out his last months, days etc. The challenges of an anticipated death are much different than the demands of a sudden death. Regardless of how we feel about our family member, our knowledge/acceptance of a terminal prognosis, there is STILL a conflict between "holding on" and "letting go:" "I'm being FORCED to put my ROTTING father in his grave" speaks to caring for him as you watched him literally "rotting away." And you are helpless to stop this process. The death of a parent also brings unique "stuff" to the table. They have been in our lives as long as we've been here, a true and likely only constant. And our parents stand between us and our own mortality, in effect a "buffer" to confronting our own finiteness. When they die, we know "We're up next." I don't mean we're going to die imminently but our own mortality comes to the forefront as never before. We start to really grapple with these implications. Hun, you will ALWAYS be that little girl who had a Daddy: A scary one, but you loved him regardless. Note I didn't say you LIKED him. Because we learned to be "care-takers" of these parents, the sense of helplessness, fear and panic you felt as a child in the concrete world of a child would be resurrected as you were present and caring for him and increase as the transitions take place in the stages of dying, particularly when he was actively dying. IMO, in your dreams your mother remains the only "buffer" to these existential and deeply profound-and frightening-implications of being human."...my mother is TAGGING ALONG with me, speaking NONSENSE and being BLANK." While you were caring for him (which is a truly intimate in every sense involvement) your mother was in the "background." This endeavor was highly personal to YOU, and her "needs" were ancillary ("nonsense") to the immediate needs of your father. It became necessary to "Blank" out her far less pressing needs-there's no time, energy etc. left over for the living when you're attending to the dying. Death IS scary. It stirs up all kinds of stuff for us: Helplessness, our own finiteness, the inevitability of our own demise and a bunch of other stuff as well. It essentially forces us into a state of introspection of both the "Big Things" in life (meaning) and the "Little Things" (what matters, what doesn't .) You held your shit together because it was necessary to take care of the business at hand. And Bess, you DID. But that push-pull we feel when we're caring for a terminally ill family member is no longer necessary after their death. It's done. The time for processing comes now.And so it's appearing in your dreams and I bet during your awake hours here and there as well. This "stuff" is floating around in an effort to bring all the internal conflicts into some kind of focus. I know it's horribly hard, but it's a necessary and a normal process. No, it will NOT remain as it is now. It WILL change over time. You can't push it, you can't force it. Grief is the most exhausting, demanding work human beings "do" IMO and experience, Bess. Those dreams speak to your very humanness, your absolute sanity even if it doesn't feel that way, Little One. TW
ReplyDeleteThanks, TW. Overall, I think I've got a grasp, but I go through these periods of time that are so overwhelming, awake and asleep, that I fear I'm slipping.
ReplyDeleteNaw. If you survived THIS well, this long it's not likely to happen now!!
ReplyDeleteTW