more than just a crazy dream

I have been thinking about Mom a lot today. We are approaching one year since she passed away. In the blog entry I wrote shortly after she died, I mentioned her words of love to me, “I’ll always love you. Never forget that.” When I want to call her to share something exciting, interesting, or difficult the part of me that so looked forward to those chats hurts. Today, I was running errands and at my daughter’s request popped in a Christmas CD. Listening to it, my mind traveled back to what was happening a year ago at this time when Mom was on hospice. And wham. The waterworks started. Losing Mom in the midst of the Christmas season was hard. No way around that.

And even though it hurts to write this entry, I’d like to share some valuable lessons that I’ve learned over the past year. A few months ago when the grief was still quite fresh, I found myself fixating on all the bad stuff. How much pain Mom had been in. How quickly she went downhill after we discovered her kidney was failing. The sadness I felt over all of her struggles was burdensome. It consumed me. I could, if I had let myself, wallow in the pain and misery that were mine throughout the last several months of Mom’s life.

But two things occurred to me. Number one, my mother would be so mad if she knew that I was dwelling on all the pain she endured. I can hear her tell me, “Now don’t be silly. I’m in heaven now. There’s nothing to cry about.” Mom never did like to draw attention to her pain, and I imagine she’d be less tolerant of it even now.

Number two, Mom’s experiencing the glories of heaven. All the pain she endured all those years is a blip on the radar screen in comparison with eternity. So now, I try to be happy and think about all the good memories we had as a family. I find that the grief that pierces my heart doesn’t cut quite as deeply when I let go of the pain and focus on the joy of life.

Thirdly, I was reminded that God did care about our pain - that his heart grieved for me and my family. Shortly before Mom died, God gave us a gift we could hold close to our hearts. A gift that would help ease our pain in the coming days, weeks, months and years. The gift He gave was a glimpse of the unseen realities happening all around us, the behind-the-scenes action, as He pulled back the curtains of Paradise and let us have a peek inside.

It happened in a dream that my sister-in-law, JoDee, had one night shortly before Mom passed away. Because we no longer left Mom alone at night, JoDee was spending the night in Mom’s apartment. In her dream my sister-in-law vividly remembers having a couple of “visitors”. The first “visitor” walked right through the front door. Being more surprised than alarmed, JoDee noticed that he was replacing a light bulb and asked, “What are you doing?” His response was straight and to the point, “I’m changing the light bulb. I need to light the way.”

A few moments later another “visitor” came in through a corner of the apartment. Again, JoDee was bemused by this visit thinking to herself, ‘I didn’t know there was a door in that corner of the apartment’. This visitor said nothing to JoDee, she simply gave a nod and a smile as she walked past her. Then the visitor walked up to gaze into my mothers’s room. JoDee watched this visitor smile as she looked at Mom, not saying a word. In that moment, JoDee woke up and heard Mom struggle and went quickly to her bedside.

Now, you could chalk this all up to a fluke, a simple dream and nothing more. But I’d like to believe that JoDee wasn’t just experiencing a dream that night but was permitted to see the unseen – what was happening all around her that couldn’t be observed with human eyes.

Several days later when I came into town, JoDee was compelled to share that dream with me. Later on, she shared with me that there are only three dreams she’s ever remembered and the two she had that night were part of those recollections. I think for my whole life I will remember these dreams. I will remember them as vividly as if they were my own. And even now, the recollection of them makes me smile; to know that someone was lighting the way for Mom, that they were preparing to bring her home.

I’ve only shared that dream with a handful of people. But the memory of it gives me such hope that I wanted to share it with all of you. Call it an early Christmas present, a gift or whatever you want. If you’re experiencing heartache like my family and I suffered last Christmas, I hope that in some small way this dream gives you comfort, hope and joy, too.