Category Archives: dreams

At First

10 Friday Jun 2011

Posted by in blood, bloodstains, dreams, father, grief, PTSD, suicide

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            Pictures of my father entered my mind, uninvited.  Thoughts of his blood invaded everything.  They swept through my every action and camped out in my dreams.  Day or night, asleep or awake, it didn’t matter.  I was suddenly emerged, pre-soaked, and never rinsed clean.  I had bloodstains on my mind.
            I obsessed.  How long had he been thinking of killing himself?  He started clearing away everything around his house nearly a month before.  Had he also planned on killing Moma?  He really could have, you know; I believed it was on his mind.  He had tried to throw away her tomato cages as if she wouldn’t have another growing season.  But Moma gave Daddy a hard time about throwing her gardening supplies away.  So he put them back. 
“What in hell’s name were you thinking?” I cried out in my sleep enough to wake me.  Had he planned on me finding him?  He knew I was coming to visit.  He knew that I usually came looking for him.  Did he have faith that I would take care of things for him?
            How long did I suffer from traumatic stress?  It was a long time.  I longed for just the grief of missing Daddy and not being stuck on how he died.  Counseling helped, although I have had uneasy feelings that tap me on the shoulder still. 
Finally, I could pinpoint when the lessening started.  In a dream, I didn’t raise that garage door; I didn’t go in calling out his name.  In my dream, I chose not to go in.  Waking, the dream left me feeling rested.  Perhaps that one particular dream was the first real scabbing-over of my heart.
            Raw grief hurts so much.  It does get easier.  It takes a while.  Look to your dreams.

Memories

04 Saturday Jun 2011

Posted by in dreams, energy, memories, miss him, suicide

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            I awoke one morning with clear visions of Daddy teaching me how the guts of an AC unit worked and then another memory of his sitting at the kitchen table trying to drum into my head the notion of compound interest.  In the first, he pointed to black tubes with his grease-covered fingers, and though his brow beaded with sweat, his eyes smile-crinkled at my understanding.  But in the next, he sat upright with a pencil eraser tapping impatiently at the examples that made no sense to me.  “Look here,” he said, his voice raised and frustrated, “you mean you can’t understand this?”  I never wanted to talk to him about money, but always, I loved helping him work out there in his garage. 
            After his death, such nightly memories sucked away my energy.  Throughout the day, I felt like bland food with no added salt, no pepper, no spice.   Come nightfall, thoughts and memories of him flickered behind my eyelids like a movie-marathon.  I saw him laughing, talking, or just looking off into thin air.  I saw his hands petting his dog or holding my mother’s hand.  I saw him sitting on the couch with his elbow on the armrest.  I heard him cuss under his breath when something he fixed broke.  I heard him whistling when things he worked on went right.  I missed him so much—I still do.
            At first, those memories hurt.  Leaded with the pain of his suicide, they came with extreme sadness and wild, horrible imaginings of the seconds before he shot himself.  Later after time healed the rawness of my grief, my true memories helped me understand that his life meant far more than just how he died. 
Memories are a pathway that connects us to others.   Memories help me hold my father in a gentle and real place now.