Hello From The Other Side

It has only been twice that I have vividly dreamt of Mark. He is often in my dreams, but always on the periphery where I can feel his presence but cannot see or hear him. In the early weeks after he died, I felt a constant panic to know that he was okay and would ask him every night to visit me in my dreams. It would be five months before he showed up to tell me I couldn’t be sad the rest of my life and needed to date. The second time he told me that searching for light was futile, that the light was in me. They were incredible dreams but didn’t answer what I most needed to know.

Are you okay?

I remember doing the same thing after my dad died. My sister and I were headed to a maternity shop for me to buy a dress for the funeral. When Mark and I initially went home to see my dad for the last time, the plan was to stay over Labor Day weekend and then fly back to Maryland. When we got there the situation was dire and my mom was trying to manage my dad’s care on her own. After two days I said to Mark, “I don’t think we can leave. My mom can’t do this on her own.” “I agree,” Mark said, and for the next ten days he sat beside my dad’s bed all day until my siblings arrived after work to take over. My dad took his last breath in the hospital, there was a wake and funeral to go to, and the four days of clothes we came with weren’t going to work for that. Mark borrowed dress clothes of my dad and brothers, but at nine months pregnant I had to go buy something. On the drive to the mall I was mesmerized by the clouds. It had stormed overnight and the clouds were fat and beautiful, the kind that looked like you could jump from one to the other. “Is that where you are now, Dad?,” I wondered because, like Mark, I was desperate to know that he was okay.

Last week I dreamt that Mark and I and our oldest daughter were going to go to the bar and grill in the shopping center near our house. We have been there countless times for dinner, happy hour, Easter brunch. It was where we met Maggie and her husband after Mark came back into town from a business trip, and they told him she was pregnant with Baby #2, news that made his fork stop mid-air. It’s where he and the kids had a surprise 60th birthday party for me. It’s where we met our neighbors one night during spring break every year for more than a decade since that was more in our price range than a family ski trip or vacationing in Mexico.

We can literally see the restaurant from our yard but in the dream Mark insisted on riding his bike. This was a point of friction between us many times. If we met at someone’s house after he got off work I’d ask him to put his bike in the back and come home with me but he always preferred to cycle. I liked walking up to the neighborhood restaurant, movie theatre, or grocery store with him, I liked walking home in the dark chatting about the night, I liked him so anywhere beside him was good. I sometimes wonder if those times I pushed back against his preference to ride alone rather than to drive or walk with me were a warning flare from the future telling me to spend all the time I could with him because he wasn’t going to be around as long as I thought. Probably not, but everything post-death gets turned over and over under a microscope.

Mark got his bike out of the garage and took off for the restaurant. When Maggie and I got there it was packed inside and we found a long table in the bar. Maggie decided to look for Mark, and while she went off to do that a group of overserved 20-somethings sat down to share the table with me. They introduced themselves and said they were there to celebrate a birthday. After a few friendly minutes they asked me if I could buy them some appetizers because they’d spent all their money on drinks. I decided this idea to grab some dinner was a bad idea all around and went to find Maggie. I finally spotted her on the patio and as soon as she saw me she said, “I found Dad.”

There in the parking lot surrounded by the guys he rode with every Saturday morning and wearing their matching jerseys, was Mark. They all wanted to know where he’d been, what he’d been doing, why he’d been gone so long. I watched for several minutes as he filled them in on everything in that animated way he had when he was excited to talk about something he found fascinating. Then he turned and looked at me and had the biggest smile on his face.

He is okay.