(Wednesday, January 23, 2013)
This dream happened a year before Mama Kay passed away:
This morning I have a dream of my mother-in-law Kay. She is driving up a steeply inclined two-lane road, deep in the woods. It could be northern Minnesota, maybe the Boundary Waters.
Somehow I get a call that she is in trouble (she has no cell phone), and somehow I am instantly transported to the passenger seat of her vehicle. She is stopped at the crest of the hill, confused. The car starts to slide backwards and I tell her, loudly, to step on the brakes. But she is in the grip of dementia and doesn’t understand my direction. She no longer knows what brakes are.
I reach my left leg over to the driver side and stomp on the brake pedal, but nothing happens. We continue to slide backwards, all the way down the hill, gaining momentum as we go. Once we reach the bottom it takes hundreds of yards for the car to stop rolling, but, miraculously, we don’t crash.
Suddenly the scene shifts. Kay, Chris and I are in a new condo Chris and I have just bought, which is why Kay headed out on the road: she wanted to see our place. We have decided it is best that she keep living with us, for her own safety.
I get up in the middle of the night. The condo is still a bit of a mess because we haven’t finished unpacking. I find Kay fallen, face down on one of the couches. I turn her over and hold her gently in my arms. She looks up at me with a child’s face. Her body is in the process of growing backwards in time: she is now about eight years old. She glows with a beautiful inner light.