Beckett came to me in a dream a few nights ago. In it, Tyler and I returned to the hospital for the first time since December to withdraw support from him. He had been there for a long time without either of us while we had decided what to do in the face of the report of his brain damage. When we arrived, the doctors stood grim-faced outside of his room and spoke with us. They said that he had not moved at all, had laid motionless during our absence, and they had seen no improvement in him. We entered his room, braced to say goodbye, when suddenly he opened his eyes and looked at me. His mannerisms were normal, and his gaze was steady. I was encouraged. As I spent more time with him, it became clear that he was making a recovery from his brain trauma after all, that he was doing even better than before! At this point in the dream, I realized that he was laying in his crib with nothing going in to or coming out of him. He was completely line free, no breathing tube even. I picked him up and cradled him in my arms. I was overjoyed. I carried him from his room and throughout the unit, meeting many of his primary nurses along the way who were also ecstatic. We all celebrated. It was a miracle! Look at this miraculous, miraculous boy! I felt relief in my breast and ease in my heart. Beckett was fine. It didn’t make sense, but Beckett was fine.
When I woke up later, I did not initially remember the dream. It was a normal morning, and I heard Moira rustling in her bedroom down the hall. It was early, grey in my room, and quiet outside. I lay in bed, willing my four year old to settle in for a little more sleep but knowing all the while that it was doubtful. As I gazed at the ceiling, foggy brained in the first moments of the day, slowly the dream came back to my mind. I am grateful it came back as a memory, instead of following me all the way in to my initial thoughts of the day, as though it had really happened. Everyone has experienced something in their subconscious that they awoke with, believing it to be true, and needing time to realize it wasn’t. That isn’t what happened. There was no moment following daybreak in which I had to realize that Beckett was in fact dead. Instead, the dream crept back to me. Imagining the devastation of believing he was living and then rediscovering his death in waking life seems unbearable, and I am glad that isn’t what happened. This time at least.
But remember I did, and so I let the dream wash over me. The experience of looking upon my living son again, of holding him in my arms. What stood out the most was my proclamation over and over again throughout it. A miracle! Beckett having beat the odds again and rose above the probable. That was what left me feeling the most empty. Beckett is beyond the aid of anything now, including miracles. His physical body lays at the bottom of the sea in tiny fragments. No miracle can give him back to me.
The dream hovered on the horizon all day. Filling my mind and my senses. Mostly a cloud through which light occasionally shined. The ache of grief is persistent, but now and again something rubs it a little rawer. Something like feeling your child against your skin and then in the same day remembering that they left you long ago. But as usual, there was a lesson to be learned from the experience.
The lesson is two fold. First, that my subconscious life is a different one entirely, and there are no rules in it. While I am there, I can fly with wings like a bird. I can quake in fear of boundless monstrosities. I can see places I’ve never seen and I can be someone I’ve never been. And there, I can be with Beckett. With him comes the second lesson. That my dream experience of Beckett mirrors part of my waking experience with him in that the pain, the rawness, is worth it. As the days have grown in to months and my time with Beckett becomes distant, I reflect often on the decisions I made that brought him in to the world, and if they were the right ones. I don’t have the answer to that, for him. But I do know for me, experiencing his life was worth my personal pain. That this permanent devastation in exchange for the time I did have and the boy I knew is a trade I would make every single time. And that resolution in my dream life is the same. After, I walked weary and heavy trying to staunch the bleeding I had woken up with. But at the same time, I am so glad to have had the dream. To have spent a little time with my sweet son. It was senseless and strange. Without logic. But we were together. And I was holding on to a miracle.
Leave a Reply