Friday, December 10, 2010

Sadness has seeds

I had a dream about my dad early this morning.  In it, he had Alzheimer's, but not how he had it in real life.  He had literary Alzheimer's.  You know how characters in books and movies with dementia always have their moments of perfect clarity, just as you know that in real life, that just ain't happening.
There was the usual weirdness in the dream.  We had a 2,000-year-old Roman tool for digging trenches that had belonged to a guy whose name was something like Placebo.  My dad and I went to the railroad tracks near Krauser's and we were stealing bushes, digging them up with the old tool.  My dad had driven there so he was in pretty good shape that day.  Obviously we were in yardwork mode.  I saw a person I know who does yardwork and suggested that my dad go and talk to him about working in his yard.  My dad refused and then he slipped from literary AD to real AD and I couldn't understand at first why he wouldn't talk to the guy.  I said "Why won't you go talk to him?" and he said, "Because sadness has seeds."
While the rest of the dream was clearly what I call "taking out the trash" (my brain defragging), that statement was so profound I remembered it when I woke up.  I had to stay in bed and think about it.  It's almost like he was saying that sadness is contagious, that he thought he'd become sad because the yardwork guy would plant a seed of sadness in my dad, and it would grow.
I can only hope that this blog and all my horrible experiences with AD are not planting too many seeds of sadness in my readers.