A longing . . .

My eyes open and I'm momentarily suspended in an amorphous semi-fog between sleep and consciousness. I blink a few times, letting in the dim light and the shapes in the bedroom -- windows, mirror, lamp on the night table. Turning my head to the left I see the comforting form of my sleeping wife, her head almost hidden by the fluffy down duvet, her small shoulders angled to the bed as she coaxes more slumber from the night. It is not time for her alarm yet.


My tears surprise me for a second or two and then I remember. I was dreaming and now I am awake and I wanted that dream to be real and it isn't and . . . my thoughts run together like watercolours in the rain . . . I sigh so deeply that I am afraid I will wake Julie. Instinctively, I reach for Gabi, stretched full length along my side, and tangle my fingers into the ruff of wavy fur on her elegant neck, as she sighs, too. My dog is real.


What I dreamed is not.


She comes to me often this way, my mother. The situations are so mundane, so everyday, as if her death almost twelve years had not interrupted us. In these dreams the flow of life continues, and we are planning, preparing for something. Sometimes we are travelling together in car, listening to the radio and singing along as we always did, our two blonde heads thrown back, only now I am driving, not her. Sometimes we are arriving at a place so familiar to us both, excited to be here and to see who's waiting for us there. She  always urges me to enter first and when I do, I find that it is not the place as we remembered it; there is neglect and decay. No one we know is there anymore and I go back to her to tell her this, but she has gone, too. I do not search for her.


I look so much like her. In dreams, she is eternally her sixty-ish self, hair done, lipstick on, wearing the shades of coral and camel and chocolate brown that looked so great on her. There is no hint of illness, no sign of the ravages of cancer that would consume her body. She smiles and hugs, smiles and makes tea, smiles and loves me. 


The dreams are not always so sadness-provoking. We have funny adventures that only she and I would ever see the humour in. We play little practical jokes on my brothers and giggle as we watch them fall for them. Sometimes all her grandchildren are babies again, somehow all one year of age - Luke, Quin, Lauren, Duncan, Angus, Peter, Amy . . . even Nolan and Zoe, who came after she was gone - and in her (now my) living room. She and I are on the floor, building block towers with them until they are crawling all over us with squeals of delight and drool. I wake from dreams like this with pure sunshine in my being and a sense that all is well.


As long as she lived my mother let me snuggle into her, from times when I was small and scared, through my teens years when we would share the den couch watching TV, her leaning back on her side with legs extended, me behind her legs, my head on her hip. I did that until I was forty-five years old, cuddled into her warmth. Sometimes we talked, sometimes we just were. I remember her hands and fingers, oval nails and flawless skin as I played my own fingers through hers. 


That's where I was this morning before my eyes opened. And my tears won't stop until they do . . .