Feb. 3rd
Another dream. Last
night I dreamt I was in the hospital room when K.B. passed away. It is likely that
the fact that I was not able to be there when it happened—we were still in
Newfoundland, two of the many caught in the backlog of people needing to get
through Toronto airport in early January—will always haunt me. If only I could
have been there to touch her hand, to kiss her forehead, to say goodbye! But
perhaps it is better (for me) to be able to keep her in my memory as she was
when I last saw her: healthy and lively and joyful.
On the other hand,
never having seen her in the hospital, I have no closure. Yes, I saw her body
at the viewing, but that was clearly not her—it was a waxen image of her.
Which probably
explains part 2 of the dream, which occurred as I was drifting in and out of
sleep as day neared. I was back in the hospital room. I was lying on one of the
beds, dozing. When I opened my eyes, I saw that K.B. was standing in the middle
of the room, stretching languorously with her arms raised to the sky. She was
fine! “See! See! It is possible to be pronounced dead and still come back!” Then I awoke.
It reminded me of The Year of Magical Thinking, which I read in the days between K.B.’s death
and funeral. In the book Joan Didion describes the sudden death of her husband
and the “magical thinking”—that is, the tendency to believe that he would
return—that gripped her in the aftermath. Even though she had seen him collapse
and die in their own living room, even though she had had him cremated and had
been at the funeral, she could not get rid of his shoes because she thought, on
some level, that he would need them when he came back.
I know that K.B. is
not returning to us. Nonetheless, the intensity of the desire for her death not to be, to not have happened is at times overwhelming. Even though I know it
is not possible to reverse time to back beyond the point when I got the text
from MayB telling me to call her immediately, and beyond that to when they were
considering sending K.B. for a CT scan, the longing to be able to travel
through time to stop those events from happening has gripped my thinking.
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