My father died June twenty-second (6/22). This was the first weekend of my summer break. My father’s wife was well prepared to handle the details of death.
I was not looking forward to summer. My mother was 83 years old and getting ready to undergo chemotherapy for a second series. She had been in remission for several months after her first series. It came back with a vengeance.
Even though my parents lived about forty minutes apart, they had been strangers for years. My mother had not been a witness to my father’s decline. She had not seen his slow march to death. She didn’t have to watch the vacant look and emaciation take over my father’s face.
That summer I was forced to watch that same look of death close in and begin to consume my mother. My mother’s husband was less prepared than my father’s wife to handle the details of death.
Time began to warp for me that summer. When I look back and try to order the events that began to happen to me, I can’t be certain of their sequential order. It all gets fuzzy in my mind and memory. I can remember fragments, some of them very vividly. However, the time stamps were missing. It was as if time had stopped for me, and I was living in a vacuum of jumbled events.
I had a dream that summer which in my mind was the initiating event that made me begin to question reality, and specifically my reality.
It was a summer day, and I had laid down for a nap. Maybe it was mid-morning. I was dressed for the day.
It’s difficult to describe what happened because it doesn’t compare to any dream that I’d ever had before this time. I’m not even sure if it was a dream. I’m calling it this because I don’t know what else to call it.
I had a vague awareness that I was lying on my stomach on my bed and my eyes were closed.Something ethereal was within me and within my mind. I remember trying to reach out and touch it. I remember trying to hold its hand to my heart. I remember it reaching back and touching me on my lower back. I had a vague sense it was placing something within me, possibly in my lower spine. Strangely I was not frightened. I kept trying to touch it and have the sensation of feeling flesh. Finally in the last seconds of this dream, I felt its fingertip and saw a flash of light. I heard or sensed it saying “thank-you”.
The last image I saw before my eyes opened to my bedroom floor was the image of a floor somewhere else. I remember seeing the bottom of file cabinets for a fraction of a second. I have no file cabinets in my bedroom.
I have no idea why this ethereal entity was thanking me. After awhile I began to speculate whether my unconscious brain had made some sort of deal. I began to remember fragments of conversation where I thought I was agreeing to something. However, I never could really understand or fully remember what all these conversations entailed. I had to face the possibility that it was all in my imagination.
After awhile I began to think that this entity had seen my future, and was somehow preparing me for it, and ensuring my survival. After this strange dream my reality began to feel as if it was shifting in front of my eyes. There were times I felt like I was in a trance or a waking dream.
During this same time frame my mother had encouraged me to open a financial fund. When I met with the financial adviser I felt like I was in a trance state. At the end of our meeting he handed me a yellow strip of paper where he had written my account number, and then we shook hands. At the moment of our handshake I had an odd flashback to touching the finger of light in my previous dream.
This yellow strip of numbers became attached to an unexplained mission that I felt I needed to explore. I could not shake this foolishness. I fell or was pushed down a rabbit hole of a number obsession. It has taken me years to climb out of it.
My mother died on November tenth (11/10) after a hard and grueling summer and early fall. After this my obsession shifted into high gear.
I have had to face all of this knowing that I’ll never really know what happened to me. I’ll never really know whether there were external forces acting upon me or whether this was all an elaborate creation of my mind alone.
movingforwardslowly 