Night visions...

“You can choose to do what you want,

but you cannot choose to want what you want.”

– Anonymous

It was late…we were supposed to meet and go out together. I had been texting…she had not been answering – the texts or the calls…I wasn’t happy.

I gave up and decided to go without her.

Just as I put on my coat she came in the door with Billy H., an old friend from church in Missouri.  He actually did not come in, but stayed just outside the door on the small, lighted porch, his pale, slender face slightly illuminated in the background. 

This was not the first time and one would think I would know better…

She was different…

Her life was so often like this.  To be around her was to accept the inevitable truth that one cannot build fences around windmills, and to be around her was to acknowledge this simply came with the territory.

Trying to hide, what had been a building frustration, and in a tone more like a petulant child, I replied,  “I thought you weren’t going to make it so I was just heading out.”  She ignored the tone, and simply said, “Give me a couple of minutes and I’ll be ready.”

I was upset, but it had always been hard for me to stay angry with her.  There was just something about her rhythm…her look…her spirit.  Like the unrelenting tug of gravity…it simply ‘was,’ and the truth is, I loved her for it.  It was kind of like remaining angry with her was not acceptable – simply not an option.  An almost palpable aura came off her like the mist on an autumn morning drifting upward from the calm waters of a small back country pond. The unmistakable unspoken sensation that reached across the room saying,  “You understand you are NOT permitted to be upset with me.  Right?”  And so, as I had been so diligently trained over the decades we had known each other…I could not be.

It had always been like that with her.  You know how it is when you are connected with someone – the recognition over time how special and important it is.  It is something you know in the quietness of your heart, that while there may be acquaintances and deeply held friends…there are few with whom we really connect…in that honest pulsing place where no one but the Almighty can see, where few…very few…seem to inherently know the combination to that secret portal of the soul, reaching straight in, past the barriers – real or imagined – to touch us with the clarity of the first rays of sunshine slipping over the mountains on the eastern horizon.

Back to the event…

She came in, took off her coat, put her things down, made the “…sorry…” comment in her own way…knowing it was really unnecessary, because it was unconditionally accepted by me.  “Give me a couple of minutes, and I’ll be ready,” she had said.  And so she was, and off we went to some event that has been lost to the night reveries with which she came.  The event may have slipped away, but the ‘time’ with her was not.  While I have known few who could so frustrate me, I have known none I consistently felt so much life with.

It is a strange thing…dreaming…

It had been quite awhile since I had seen her.  It is not that I hadn’t tried to connect with her…it is not that I hadn’t prayed for her to come to me…it is not that I hadn’t needed to feel her spirit again, but that great ‘scheduler in the sky’ had not been able to get anything set up on her calendar or mine. My texts and calls to Him had also gone unanswered, but then what does one say to the Creator of the Universe? – “Hey, are you listening to me?”  Probably not.

So I tucked into bed like every other night with no expectation.  The day had been long and I was tired…the gentle ‘gift of the gods’ came quickly.

“It was late…we were supposed to meet and go out together. I had been texting…she had not been answering – the texts or the calls…I wasn’t happy.

I gave up and decided to go without her.”

Epilogue…

I woke from the dream with a tear stained face…not tears of sorrow, but pleasure and joy for having been able to spend a little time with her once again, even if it was only in my mind in the drifting vapors of a dream.

It will be two years in February since my sister left us, in the withering pitch black, cobweb filled cave of Alzheimer’s, her essence wrapped tightly in the strangling straight jacket of impending death.  This is the way she left us…it is NOT the way she lived her life. 

I look forward to ‘seeing her’ again…

- ted