☽ An Old Dream ☾

I found the following essay, written over three years ago, buried in a linty crevice on my hard drive. It is about my father and a dream I had that he’d died unexpectedly. At the time, he was not dead. He was old, yes, and his health was not perfect, but he’d been alive at the time of the dream. Since then, he has left this earth, nearly three years to the day of the original dream.

I’ve pasted the essay here with minimal editing (although I am sure it needs a good scrub). I could have added updates and caveats, some “if only I knew then” wisdom but I didn’t want to kill the mood, as it were.

From January 28, 2018

Last night I dreamed my father was dead. My mother called with the news. “He died suddenly. I’m sorry, honey.”

            My first thought, in the dream: I guess that was the last time I’ll ever see him, thinking of the last time I saw him. Which was recently. It usually isn’t.

            In my dream, it didn’t seem odd that my mother would call; in waking life it would be very odd indeed. In the real world, it would be my stepmother, or a neighbor. Or the authorities, if he’d been left awhile and my stepmother was away, like she often was for her work.

            The second thought in my dream was sadness, which makes sense, dream or not. Real grief. Bawling. Tears. Sobbing into the phone. Thinking about calling my brothers. Planning a funeral. Thinking how the iPhone I’d just sent him would never get used and how it was supposed to be a way to stay connected.

            And then the baby started his crying waking song and the dream broke, and I woke.

            But like all dreams of loss it hung on, stayed with me as I scooped up the baby, prepared his bottle. As I took a lingering morning piss scanning my Facebook feed.

            My father died last night. But he didn’t. He didn’t die, not yet. But it made me think: He could die. He could die at any moment. He is eighty years old, for fuck’s sake.

            I mean, yes, we all could die at any moment. That’s the sword of Damocles we all pretend we’re not walking under every day as we go about our mundane tasks. Because if we stop and think about mortality, really think about it, it results in nothing but gut-churning panic.

            At least for me. Meditation will only do so much in that regard.

            But, my father is not dead. Not yet. He is, I imagine, right at this moment, puttering around his house in a small town in eastern Pennsylvania. Drinking tea, maybe, and watching the birds at the feeder outside his dining room window. It’s a good window, a nice place to watch birds.

            Here in my basement Brooklyn apartment with its odd L-shaped configuration, out of our six windows, we get just one with a proper bird-watching view. And you have to stand by the bathroom door in the corner of the living room to access it, taking care that whoever is in the bathroom does not bean you in the back of the head when they emerge, looking down at the phone in their hand. Also, you have to suspend disbelief and will away the ugly diamond-shaped grid of the security bars as you stare past them in order to watch the birds. It is not a good window, or a nice place to watch birds.

            My mother also likes to look at birds out the big kitchen door of her Brooklyn house.

            So it is possible at some point during the day, at a random moment, I may be looking out my gritty, barred window, my father out his large picture, my mother through the long glass of her door, and we’re all watching birds.

            My mother would shudder in revulsion to ponder this connection: Me and your father have nothing in common. My father, who knows? He’s decided to be less bitter after all these years. He might even enjoy the thought. I think, in the only way I know how (which is cynicism run through with the hot knife of existential panic) that these are the things that merge and entwine, connect and hold us to each other, like it or not. And one day my son might be at a window somewhere in the world, watching the birds after a dream in which he learned I was dead. And he may be holding his child, or petting his cat, and he’ll think of me, glad for the moment, that I am not dead.

            At least not yet.