Bereavement Observations #3: Dreams of the Dead
    About a week ago I awoke out of a curious dream. I don't remember all of it, but what stays with me is that my mother had been resurrected and she and I were discussing the details of having to announce to the rest of our world that she had come back to life.
    There was no question but what she had died, we were agreed on this. She remembered having died. I remembered her having died. She looked slightly different than she actually did over the last few years: Her skin was smoother than before (something that would have pleased her, I'm sure, since she was bothered, for years, by her early, prodigious wrinkling, a physical trait inherited from her mother), for instance, and she appeared to have lost some weight. She did not, however, look younger. Her hair was short, thin and white; she was dotted with the "liver spots" which so often fascinated her. Her usual features, though, were exactly as they had been at her death.
    She was not sitting in her rocker but, rather, at our dinette table. Further, she was not facing the table, as was her pre-death wont, but was perpendicular to the table, facing me. She was relaxed and appeared to be much more mobile than she had been in some years. She had no idea how it was that she had managed to return from the dead but she was not concerned about how or why it had happened.
    As we discussed the difficulty and absurdity of convincing people that she had returned from the dead, she opened her arms and said, matter of factly, "Well, here I am. That's going to be hard to dispute."
    I agreed, and laughed.
    We set upon listing notifications that needed to be made: Changing her tax profile for last year, for instance; retrieving death certificates that had already been sent. We both agreed that it was serendipitous that I hadn't completed much death business at that point.
    "Do you suppose," I remember her musing as she tapped the table with the tip of her right index finger, a habitual tic of hers when considering solutions to problems, "there is a certificate that covers this type of circumstance?"
    That's when I awoke.
    Later.
- posted by Gail Rae @ 19:16   email  this post