I had one of my rare dreams the other night—a dream that I am in (as me) and involving people and places that actually exist. It was a long and complicated dream and I’ll spare you the details. But as part of it, I was hanging around with
a bunch of ghosts. Not scary ghosts going “whooo” and rattling chains, simply
spirits of dead people. One of them was my dad. And at first (in the dream)
it was cool to have my dad’s ghost around—not much different from having a flesh-and-blood Alzheimer’s dad—there but not there, you know?
But as I spent more time trying to communicate with my father’s ghost, I realized
something horrible. Something that stayed with me when I woke up, even as the other details of the dream faded away.
My father’s ghost still had Alzheimer’s.
How unfair is that? In the dream, and now, awake, I raged against that.
That is not how it is supposed to be. If you have dementia, when you die, you get everything back. You have to. You die and you go to the Elsewhere bar and have a drink. Whatever it was your soul was supposed to learn (or teach you) by stripping away your memories and your personality, you learn it and have a good chuckle, and then you hold the door for some newcomers (8 per hour,
just from the US).
You don’t come back as a sad, demented ghost.
I don’t know what in my psyche triggered that dream and I can only hope that it was wrong.
(cross posted to my
Shamanic Musings blog)
2 comments:
My name is Matt and I wanted to thank you for your blog and your comments. I spent 3.5 years working in an Alzheimer’s/Long Term Care facility in Utah and I know the difficulties and pains associated with this disease. I personally got to know some great people afflicted with Alzheimer’s and I also became close with some of their families. I’ve seen a lot of resources that help. One in particular seems to be a great benefit: http://www.thecaringspace.com
Please pass this link along to anyone you feel could benefit from it.
It is well known that even strangers to your dad, and I think he wants to tell that his mind is always at your side, which hurts the subconscious of an always remember the last time, I also spent it with my grandmother since she took me from a very small, and when she died, cancer of the pancreas, taking medications such as vicodin, oxycodone, recalled his last moments were nice to me that although she did not notice your pain.
Post a Comment