Its so odd. We know how this will end, but while we wait, a low level of anxiety, a disturbance in my chest, a bubble of grief just below the surface, waits. I can think of nothing else.

Waiting… as she lets go reluctantly, we let go as well. Pre-mourning. An expectation of mourning.

She is guarded/protected by her family, only family. They are honoring her process by contracting around her. This is how it should be. All her energy goes to this transition. We who wait cannot fathom how this is, how this funny, energetic, bright woman can shrink herself down so drastically to attend to the process of dying. But attend she must.

When my mother died I felt so strongly a sense of rebirth, the gradual effacement of the membrane between dead and alive. Sue was aware of this in the last two weeks. She spoke about looking forward to see what comes next.

Its strange that I have accepted the family’s and Sue’s right to be private. I have felt resentful(I’m family), sad, and kind of ornery. But you know what? That’s okay.

Nothing to be done. We can’t fix this. We can’t cook enough casseroles, or provide enough succour to help this. Nothing to be done.

Waiting…

The first one was about Kate.  The second about the house on Manual Road and the third about a job I lost through my own inability to deal with the trauma over the first two. I only want to talk about the third dream as it was a dream of joy and redemption.  It was a gift of a dream I gave to myself.

There was a wholle group of us in a Elizabethan style library.  Dark wood and books lined the shelves floor to ceiling.  Everyone from Madrona was there and from KMHS.  All my buds and staff.  We were acting out parts of a Shakespeare play and laughing and hamming it up like we used to at staff meetings.  It was lovely.  It opened my eyes to what I had lost but allso the great joy of what I had built.

Somehow (you know, dream), this took me to my firing scene and how I could of played that out by just stating how I fucked up, I didnt know what I was doing, I went down a rabbithole of failure that I had blamed myself for.  I fucked up the thing I loved the most that had saved me from going down the tubes.

Everything would spill out then—the betrayal of my husband, my daughter’s terminal illness, the loss of my house and my friends—all of it.  That fucking toxic stew of shit right behind my breastbone.

Why didn’t I?  In the dream I did and the whole  edifice I had built, the humor, the I can do this, the determination I had  no one that I was going to let feel sorry for me and shame me by that.  I had an attitude and it almost ruined me.

Note to all who read this.  Fuck your pride. Be vulnerable if you have the chance.  Don’t hide away in your hidey-hole licking your wounds in private while pretending everything is fine.  I let my staff down and I left the kids down.  Those are the only ones I let down.

At the end of the dream a relief swept me, a joy.  Yeah, I fucked up.  I fucked up KMHS.  But I fucked up myself worse and have been doing that for years.  Time to forget and forgive.