Too Many Concerns - Most of Them are Due to My Dreaming...

Trigger Warning: This post includes conversation about the deaths that my family has experienced recently.

 

I woke up extra early this morning and could tell it was nowhere near time to get up. I rolled over and actually went to sleep (which is unusual for me). I then dreamed.

Now, I don't usually remember dreams unless they are full of negative emotions, and these dreams were just that - full of grief. For some reason, William Shatner was in the first part of the dream and the second half took place in the kitchen and hallway of the church that I grew up in back many decades ago (but that still looks exactly the same as it did back then). There were two people who had lost their adult children in the span of my dream - William and another person (I remember recognizing her, but I cannot remember who it is now). I was there when both of them heard about their loved ones. I woke up fully engulfed in my grief for them and in my own grief. There was just too much similarity between my recent experiences and these dreams to be anything other than a message to my brain from my brain.

Today is the anniversary of the day when my Dad seemed to break. My father was not the same after Trump lost the election last year, and he died ten weeks after the election after a rapid decline, a fall, and then just not ever getting better. For me, this date was the beginning of this particular ending. 

I miss my Dad, especially when I am thinking about all the things that are currently causing me so much stress. Last year, he stopped making comments on Facebook after election day. He knew that I did not share his disappointment about the election - we had stopped talking about politics WAY before this day arrived - but he just sort of stopped. As he progressed in his decline, my Mom says that he had delusions that he was the President. He had very specific ideas about what his platform would be - most of them had to do with the control of women (not my Dad's outlook or attitude at all when he was in control of his mind). Mom and my sister shut that down with the comment, "Well, you wouldn't be elected by this house." On November 30, he stumbled while trying to go outside to see what people were doing with the landscaping project outside his door. He fell hard, went to the hospital by ambulance, was admitted without my mother present, was given a chest x-ray, and then was discharged. The hospital did not give my mother any sort of information about what they had done or told my Dad to do while he was there. We think he had a stroke, but we have absolutely no confirmation because they did not check anything. There may also have been a hip fracture, but they did not even check. (In this entire scenario, I am really angry with the hospital and how they did not even ask my mother what was going on. She was not even allowed inside! Now, I understand about COVID precautions and all, but a phone call to Mom would have helped them actually care for my Dad. Instead, they just gave him a chest x-ray. There were no follow up instructions given to Mom at all. The doctor refused to see him unless Mom could get him to the clinic, which she was not able to do. Healthcare failed my father, until hospice got involved.) My mother was trying to provide care for a man who was not the man he was even two days prior without any sort of assistance or help. After a week of trying to help Dad make it to the bathroom and failing, she was at her wit's end. Someone finally told her to investigate home healthcare, and they recommended hospice care to Mom. Mom called, had a home visit, and they were going to deny him the service until Mom mentioned that he had been able to drive himself places just the week before. After that was shared, the hospice intake coordinator was able to find a billable reason for the need for care, and then they took over. Dad and Mom had some help. Dad lived for another six weeks after that and chose to let go on my Mother's birthday, two weeks after Christmas.

More recently, my cousin died in an alcohol-related situation. She was a binge drinker and alcoholic. She got into a fight with her parents, drove away, and was found in her car two weeks later. My aunt is my Dad's twin sister, and she has been up and down with her grief process. When my sister, Mom, and I went out to the East Coast at the end of September, it was to go to my cousin's memorial service and inurnment. My aunt feels like the deaths of her daughter and her brother are her fault. She makes those statements on a regular basis. She fluctuates between wailing and then extreme stoicism. She has been attending counseling, and I hope that she is able to find some peace in her life since these events have changed how we all relate to one another. She has expressed to my mother that it is not fair that my mother has two daughters, and she doesn't have any. My mother, being the therapist that she is has not retorted, "Well, you have one husband, and MINE died," but she has admitted to thinking it several times.

I can see why my brain went into grief mode in my dreams. I just wish that my subconscious would keep those types of dreams to itself the way I usually function. This is the beginning of the first ending in my family unit, and I expect that my grief process will continue. I miss my Dad, and I wish he was here to tell me things that I need to hear during this time of change in my life. He was the single most important male figure in my life, and I miss our relationship. I miss being able to call him up and share silly memes that I saw. Mom is just not the same, even though she has stepped into the role of daily check-ins admirably over the past 10 months. She is just not Dad.

I am not sure why this is striking me so hard at the moment. I guess that my dreaming has triggered lots of responses in my body this morning. I am always very interested in how these things come about. Are my dreams triggering my response, or is my neurological state causing the dream? It's a chicken and egg type question, so I am not sure if I am dreaming because my body is releasing the hormones that I associate with stress and extreme emotion or if my brain is activating in places that are associated with both the hormone release and the dreaming or if there is a completely different thing happening here. It is interesting to contemplate what is going on. My rational mind is always very interested in what my emotional mind is doing, and I can feel the rational part of my brain thinking very deeply about this as my emotional mind is releasing tears and spurring my impulse to cry.

The silly thing is that I am not all that sad or upset about things. I am a bit stressed with moving details, but all of those things are happening the way they always happen in moves (which is why I haven't moved from this apartment for 17 years!). Things are completely missing and piled up and disorganized. I just found out that I am closing on things 4 days earlier than expected, so that is both good and bad. I will have more time to move things over before the movers arrive, but an entire 9 days of living between two places. The closing date is no longer on a Friday but is now on a Monday, so I will have four days of trying to decide where to sleep as I am getting things started over to the new place and still packing up things in the old place. Who knows where I will lay my head. I do not have gas service until the original date. I might need to change that appointment...hmm.

I can feel the stress starting behind my eyes. Time to go take my shower and get ready to head off into the cool morning for the first day in a very long time where I finish up my day with choir rehearsal at the church!! It has been since March 15, 2020 that I have been a choir director. Let's hope that my choir members show up!!