1.
In the week after your death, you visit many of your loved ones in their sleep. Everyone has some vision in which you appear, smiling and tender, touching them gently and dispensing words of wisdom (or, as was often your wont in life, Spice Girls lyrics). To most of your friends and family, there is comfort in this. Through the ache of your death, the almost unimaginable emptiness of a world without you in it, this sliver of hope gleams: She’s gone, but she’s still thinking of us. She’s still laughing in the Great Whatever Comes Next. She knows how much we miss her. She wants us to know it will be okay.
You don’t come to me. I receive no reassurances, no affirmation that you love me or that we’ll see each other again. I haven’t believed in life after death since I was ten years old, but I still resent this slight. Why do you have a goodbye for everyone but me?
2.
The first time I dream about you, you have been dead for thirteen days, ashes for seven. I am following you down the halls of our high school, which is flooded, the water cold and rising past our ankles. My jeans are rolled up to the knee. You wear your bridesmaid dress from my wedding, which was the last day I saw you alive, and only one shoe. You keep looking back over your shoulder – not at me – and I catch glimpses of your face. You don’t look like yourself.
I follow you out a window, the one we used to climb out of to skip class, into a courtyard I’ve never seen before. There’s a swimming pool in the center, overflowing – that’s where the water swirling up my shins is coming from. “I didn’t know we had a pool,” I say. Behind me, inside the building, people are running to escape the flood. “It’s too shallow,” you say. “It can’t hold everything.” There’s a tattoo of birds covering your right arm. I don’t know why I want to throw up until I wake and remember that you died with that tattoo unfinished.
3.
I have this recurring scene that shows up in all of my nightmares. Each time, something terrible is happening – someone has broken into my house, a man with a knife is following me, my brother is sick, my partner has fallen and is lying in a pool of blood. Each time, I pull out my phone to call for help, but I can’t complete the call. My fingers are numb and fumbling and I drop the phone and it breaks, or I dial the number wrong, or I have no service, or I make the call and try to scream my panic to whoever’s listening but my throat is dry and nothing comes out but a pathetic gasping wheeze.
Every time I have this dream, the same thought runs through my mind, with perfect coherence and clarity: I’ve dreamed about this so many times, and now it’s happening for real. I knew it. The resignation, the powerlessness, the inevitability are crushing, and far more frightening than the danger is the knowledge that I knew it was coming all along, and there was nothing I could do to avoid it. It’s the same feeling that sinks like sediment in my chest when I wake up from a dream about you.
4.
In this dream, you are sick and everyone knows it, as opposed to in real life, where you were sick and no one knew until it was too late. Your husband asks you to move out of your apartment, so that his new girlfriend can move in. You are dying; she is not. He has to think about his future.
I visit you in your new place, which is an enormous bed in front of an enormous window. There is no other furniture. There are no posters or paintings on the walls. The window looks out over an unfamiliar city, blurry with rain. Your blankets and sheets are blue-gray, rain-colored. You haven’t gotten out of bed in weeks. You roll over and face the windowless wall, and I know it’s so you won’t have to admit that you don’t remember my name.
5.
It is a year after your death and you knock on my door. “Where have you been?” I say. I don’t remember that you are dead, just that I haven’t seen you in an unreasonably long time. “I’ve missed you! So much has happened!”
“I tried to call you,” you say with a shrug. “I’ve been in Europe, touring with my band.”
“Your band?” You bought an acoustic guitar in high school, learned about three songs, and never picked it up again. “I thought you stopped playing guitar.”
“I’m the drummer,” you explain. You lead me outside and show me your tour bus, parked in the street. (How did you get it here from Europe?) It’s covered in bright-colored graffiti, but I’m not convinced it’s really yours until you show me the inside. The walls are plastered in pictures ripped from magazines, handwritten set lists, and band posters – exactly the same way you decorated your bedroom in high school. I recognize the Bon Jovi picture that used to hang above your bed.
6.
I’m at a party and everyone knows each other but me. When I try to speak, the volume of conversation around me gets louder, until my voice is drowned out. I’m shouting without making a sound, and finally I give up and walk outside, crying and feeling helpless. Heather was supposed to be here, I think, resenting you for being late again.
The sun is going down, and I sit on the porch while the party thunders inside. I feel, rather than see, you sitting down beside me. I should be thrilled to see you, but I just feel relieved, leaning into the solid weight and warmth of your shoulder.
“I thought you were going to be here,” I say. “You were supposed to be here before.”
“I had to take a boat,” you say. “I live on a houseboat now.”
“Why?”
“I’m a firefighter,” you explain. “I sail around the world fighting fires. I’ve been to Alaska.” You point across the street, which I realize now is a frozen river. On the other side of the river is a landscape of snow and barren trees that I immediately recognize as Alaska.
“Why didn’t you come home sooner?” I ask.
“There are a lot of fires in Alaska,” you say. We lean against each other as the sun goes down over the ice. Everything is perfectly silent.
7.
It’s my wedding day again. I am getting married in my father’s backyard, which is a beautiful sun-soaked field in the Rocky Mountains with a stream running through it, and also kind of the library from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. My wedding party is lining up, but you haven’t appeared. You’re late, just like you were the day of my real wedding. I try and try to call you, to ask where you are, to hear your voice. I am on the edge of panic. My fingers are numb, and even though I’ve known your number by heart for thirteen years, I keep dialing wrong. I drop my phone and it shatters into a thousand pieces. I think, I should have known this would happen.
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Tags: death, friendship, lindsay king-miller, writing
This hurts my heart so badly. I can feel the pain.
“You roll over and face the windowless wall, and I know it’s so you won’t have to admit that you don’t remember my name.”
Everything about this so perfectly captures what that insurmountable distance of death feels like. All those canyons we can’t cross, and we stare at them anyway, straining our eyes looking for paths.
I lost my friend so suddenly last November and I needed this. Thank you.
So sad, so lovely though. The unfinished tattoo killed me.
Do you know the Be Good Tanyas song “Only in the Past”? About a year after one of my friends died, I had the dream in the song, and then I listened to the song again, and then I sobbed convulsively. Because the dead are there in my mind – I feel like I could touch them, tell them things and hear their opinions – but they don’t see me. They never wave back.
That might be a highly personal experience, but I’m going to link to the song anyways. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztuhFbKq3GI
Oh, this really hit home for me today. A dear friend passed away months ago, but I only found out a few weeks ago. Last night I dreamed I visited her family, her husband and two daughters, and have been trying to keep my head above waves of grief all day. Big Hugs to everyone who finds themselves missing those who should still be here.
It’s been 10+ years and I still have the dream where my parents got divorced instead of my mom dying, and when she tells me why she hasn’t been around I just get so angry with her. Then I wake up and remember, and I always think, next time I’ll be nicer. Next time I’ll just be happy that she came back to me.
Thank you so much for sharing, this was beautiful. I hope you’re healing well.
“Next time I’ll be nicer.” That’s what I keep thinking every day (My mom’s been gone for 19 months.) That, and, “Next time we’ll catch the cancer before it’s too late.”
I’m so sorry to hear about your mom. That’s so hard. I hope you’re OK (and it’s totally fine if you aren’t — I feel like that doesn’t get said enough).
Truth.
Pretty sure I am ok in the way that I am processing my grief in healthy and mostly-appropriate ways. But there was a while there where the only people I could stand to see were other people in the dead mom club for exactly NOT feeling ok.
That’s a pretty sucky club.
Thank you.
That’s so true — it’s a sucky club, but I wouldn’t have made it without it’s members. What an admittance fee, though.
Thank you so much. So so much.
The first time I dreamed about my friend after she died, she was laughing and leading me down a path into school, and I kept saying, “I thought you’d died,” and she said No, no, I’ve been here all along, and I felt so betrayed that I had grieved for all this time, and so glad it wasn’t really true, and then I woke up.
One of the first dreams I had about my dad after he died was that he walked in the door after work. I said “Dad, what are you doing here? You’re dead.” He looked at me, said, completely deadpan, “Well, that’s a problem now, isn’t it?” I woke up laughing and crying. Thank you for writing this. It is easy to feel alone in the immensity of your grief.
My dad has shown up every now and then in my dreams since his passing 10 months and 1 day ago, but not in any meaningful way, and I never remember that he’s gone until I wake up. I wouldn’t mind having a better Dad Dream.
I hope that for you, Bittersweet. I hope your father’s day wasn’t too hard. Four years on and I still spend my father’s days reading articles like this and feeling grateful that someone understands.
Oh man. That sounds like something my dad would say, too.
@Bittersweet, I have the same experience. ONCE I remembered, just as I was waking up, and I leant in and hugged him really really quick as I was waking up. Usually, though, he is just there. And sometimes I am confused – I never know he’s dead but I have some sense he shouldn’t be there or he hasn’t been here for a long time. It’s been five years and I haven’t had a dream with him in it for almost two. I am not sure how I feel about that.
I can relate. Thinking about him less is natural, but it makes me feel so guilty. Who is going to remember him if it’s not me?
You mean you start thinking about him less? That actually makes me feel as bad as not having him here. I think about him very often in my waking hours, even if he doesn’t show up so much at night.
I used to think about him all day every day. As time goes on, I still think of him, but being without him is now my normal, so he’s not constantly running through my head. I think of him every day, but my thoughts are more fleeting. It’s good in some ways (I am more likely to think of things he taught me, things he said, habits he had, etc, instead of his death) and bad in others (weird irrational feelings of guilt for not rending my garments and wailing every day for the rest of my life). I’m articulating this badly- but as time goes on, I’ve become accustomed to being without him, and, as such, I spend less time dwelling on him and more time referencing him in passing to explain an odd tic of mine, illustrate a story from my childhood, etc. Maybe it’s just a different kind of thinking as opposed to a different amount. I’m sorry, I’m not making any sense!
No, you are making sense! I’m still at the stage where things are raw and painful, but I can see how you would get to a different kind of thinking about him. Thanks for sharing that.
I still sometimes dream of Julia. In the dreams she brings me bags of charity shop clothing (like she did in life) wrapped in tissue paper. But all the clothes are too small. I remind her that she hasn’t seen me since I was 13, and she laughs and says I’m not so different after all.
Sometimes she’s supposed to come to the wedding she never lived to see, only she’s late and comes with a load of people I don’t know and she tells me they’re my family, and that she spent hours trying to find them for me. And sometimes she’s just sitting on my sofa reading all the things I’ve written that she never got to read.
It has been thirteen years. In that time they’ve gone from being bad dreams where I lose her, over and over, and gone to good ones where seeing her is a comfort.
<3
I read this on the seven year anniversary of a childhood friend’s death. Thank you, and I’m sorry.
“I tried to call you,” you say with a shrug. “I’ve been in Europe, touring with my band.”
Oof. It probably says a lot about the inside of my head that in my dreams they haven’t been away, they’ve been right here the whole time, and I haven’t been calling or writing or checking in.
I had the same recurring dream about my grandmother, my first partner/best friend/highschool sweetheart, and my father where each showed up and asked — in a voice so sad and unreproachful that it broke my heart every time — why I’d stopped speaking to them. Why I’ve been ignoring them. Why I let them disappear.
And I’m struck through with guilt and horror every time: But I thought you were dead. I didn’t let you disappear! I didn’t turn away, I didn’t stop speaking, I didn’t forget you. I thought I’d lost you. I never meant to hurt you. I miss you. I love you. But it’s not enough.
I don’t have these dreams often anymore, but I still feel that shame and sorrow all the way through to my bones.
I’m so sorry. That sounds like a horrible, horrible experience.
I read somewhere, a few months after my dad died, that when people we love die our relationships with them don’t die. They’re not there on the other end but we still have that relationship with them. Sometimes I love that and sometimes it makes me really mad. How come I have to still take care of this relationship with them? And then I get scared that if I let that relationship go, that is it forever.
That was my big revelation in grief counseling ~20 years ago. I had been dwelling over my [best friend/first partner/it’s complicated]’s terrible, lingering death so long that its details had completely eclipsed everything else.
Then I realized why: I was unconsciously drawing out the last experience we would have together. I was holding onto the last thing we shared because I feared a life where we no longer had an experience to share. But clinging to that misery, to his last pain and suffering, meant ignoring all the years of everything else we’d had. Once I clarified that thought, I was able to let go of the last terrible days and months a bit and remember the years and years before that much more clearly.
I agree with you that those relationships still persist after one person’s death. I said it in the comments on my Father’s Day article : almost ten years after his death, I still see new aspects of my relationship with my father in my mind. Like something set in amber, it’s still here and it’s still susceptible to study and consideration.
Lindsay. My chest.
After I had to move thousands of miles away from a city I did not want to leave I kept having dreams my friends had died, like if I wasn’t observing them they’d disappear.
For a few years after my Dad died of malignant melanoma, I would dream of him only around the anniversary of his death. The late days of bleak February. In those dreams he was always as he was after his surgery. His nose askew. His hair deranged. Mad. Irrational. The surgeons had had to cut out his cheekbone and the bone of his nose to get at the cancer lurking in his sinus cavity. In cutting away the orbit of the eye, they opened the skull to that foul thing. In those dreams he would eat dog shit and flail at me, raging.
The tenth year after his death, I was dying myself of an inadequately diagnosed condition. A cure; not miraculous, just routine that no doctor could be bothered to effect. “What’s the matter? Don’t you like men?” I was tired. Unravelled. Worn to death. I slept away that winter. And dreamt.
At last, I dreamt of my father.
But in this dream he was whole. He was as he had been before the surgery. Before the nose bleeds. Before the doctors. Before the radiation and the burns. My father. Proud. A bit of a dandy. My conscious mind says, “But he is dead.”
In this dream my mother, my sister and I are visiting him in the Afterlife. I know he is dead. Even in this dream, I know he is dead. My conscious mind repeats itself, repeats itself, repeats itself. “But he is dead.” But he is himself. We are at lunch on a patio under an umbrella and he is his tan linens that he so fancied. Handsome. He is himself.
After lunch, he takes us to his office. He is still dead, but he has a good job in this Afterlife. He is so pleased. So proud. A nice, bright office. A government job. He is showing me the galley kitchen where the coffee is made. Just me. My mother and sister are elsewhere. Just me and my father.
And then he is kissing my face as he did when I was little. Holding me in his arms and kissing my face as he did when I was little. And I am calling him Daddy as I never did when I was little. I am infused with happiness. A tincture of happiness spreading to every atom of my being. I feel it in my fingers and toes; in my muscles and in my hair and in my teeth. Happiness. I feel my father there with me. I know my father is there with me. In the office where he works. In the bed where I lay sleeping. He is there with me.
And then I wake.
My father and I did not have an easy relationship. He demanded better. He despised the gay. He had no filter. But he loved me when I was little. Then, he loved me best of anyone.
I have never dreamt of him since. But the memory of that dream is so intense, so real, so immediate, that I feel that same warmth, that happiness, even tonight in writing this. My father is with me.
Why, WHY did I read this at 4:45. Now I have to leave work and then my boyfriend is going to look at me and say ‘what’s wrong?!’ and I’m going to have to tell him that I’ve been crying about things on the internet again.
When I dream of my mother, she always smells like sunscreen. She plays with my hair in exactly the right way. Sometimes she pats my leg and walks away from me, and sometimes she picks me up and takes me with her. She never has any tubes, and she never smells like medicine, and she never says anything. Sometimes she has that crazy, pain-fucked stare that begs me not to leave her alone, but her hands are cool and dry in mine. I wake up and wish I’d checked what colour her eyes were, or if she really had the same freckle constellation on her shoulder as I have on my neck, or told her I loved her, or made her say something, literally anything,… and actually, I think dreams are shitty little things.
Well this just sort of tore my guts out and draped them delicately across my desk chair.
For the longest time, in all of my dreams about my mother she was sick, miserable, in poor health. Either from something other than the heart attack that killed her, or struggling to recover from it. In all my dreams she’d lived and she was unhappy. I’d just wake up hating myself for having ever wanted that, for wanting more time to say goodbye instead of a phone call out of the blue at 4:45 AM, when it was already too late.
I had water dreams after my dad died–we were looking down on his grave from the top of the Eiffel Tower and watching as it filled with water. That’s all I remember, but that image sticks with me to this day, nearly 15 years later.
He still shows up in my dreams sometimes–I fill him in on what’s happened since he died. I explain iPods and WiFi and 9/11. I introduce him to my boyfriends. Every time, I convince myself that it’s not a dream, that he’s really back. Finally. It used to be that I would wake up from these dreams devastated and heartsick that he was still gone.
Now I’m just glad that he still stops by to say hi.
Thank you for this.
I lost a childhood friend in January to bacterial meningitis. He was 3 months older than me (to the day), was the first guy I ever went on a date with, came to the hospital to support me autumn before last when my mom was sick, and texted back and forth with me about ridiculous things like the Hobbit movies. I found his texts the other day on my phone and started crying. Sometimes it’s the little things out of the blue that hit us the hardest.
That was my big revelation in grief counseling ~20 years ago. I had been dwelling over my [best friend/first partner/it's complicated]'s terrible, lingering death so long that its details had completely eclipsed everything else.
Then I realized why: I was unconsciously drawing out the last experience we would have together. I was holding onto the last thing we shared because I feared a life where we no longer had an experience to share. But clinging to that misery, to his last pain and suffering, meant ignoring all the years of everything else we'd had. Once I clarified that thought, I was able to let go of the last terrible days and months a bit and remember the years and years before that much more clearly.
I agree with you that those relationships still persist after one person's death. I said it in the comments on my Father's Day article : almost ten years after his death, I still see new aspects of my relationship with my father in my mind. Like something set in amber, it's still here and it's still susceptible to study and consideration.
My heart. This is so beautiful.
My heart. This is so beautiful.
Oh, Lindsay. Your heartbreak breaks my heart, and that’s OK. I’m so sorry for your loss. I’d help shoulder some of the grief for you if I could, but that’s part of the heartbreak too – it’s all yours.
One day it won’t be so insurmountable. One day you’ll feel like you can breathe without that catch in your chest, and that instant pain on remembering. It’ll be there always, but some days the scar won’t ache as much.
There were a few very worst things about packing up my friend’s apartment after he died. Finding the original art for his tattoo was one of them.
Six months since he died, two years since Mom did. No dreams with either of them, but I do see my friend’s distinctive swagger about once a month on a stranger.
You mean you start thinking about him less? That actually makes me feel as bad as not having him here. I think about him very often in my waking hours, even if he doesn't show up so much at night.
No, you are making sense! I'm still at the stage where things are raw and painful, but I can see how you would get to a different kind of thinking about him. Thanks for sharing that.