There’s a blog I’ve found helpful over the last few months called “What’s Your Grief”. A recent posting on “ambiguous grief” hit particularly close to home.

“There are times in life when someone we love becomes someone we barely recognize.  The person is still physically with us, but psychologically they are gone. There are a range of reasons this can happen.  Some of the most common are things like addiction, dementia, traumatic brain injuries, and mental illness.  If you have never lived through loving someone in such a situation, this can be hard to understand.  The person you love is still there, sometimes they ‘look’ sick, sometimes they don’t.  But regardless of how they look, they do things they would never have done, they say things they would never have said, treat you in ways they never would have treated you, and they are not there for you in ways they previously were. 

Your mom, who always loved and supported you, doesn’t recognize you, understand you or says hurtful things.  You husband, who was always kind and considerate, is now lying and stealing to support an addiction.  You son, who was brilliant and driven, is now struggling with delusions and hallucinations.

These things do not change our love for the person – we still love our mom with dementia, our husband with an opiate addiction, our son with schizophrenia.  But this continued love doesn’t change how deeply we miss the person they used to be, the person we lost.  Though we still have a relationship with the person it has radically changed and we grieve the relationship we used to have.

Things get even more complicated if that loved one dies. Our recent experience with the behaviors and words of the ‘new’ person causes us to question our old memories.  Our ‘ambiguous grief’ feelings may be sadness and yearning, anger and guilt, or a range of other emotions.” 

I’m not sure if “ambiguous” is the right word for it – but I certainly agree that our grief experience feels more complicated and far more difficult to navigate; shaped by our journey with Jordan in the years preceding his death. As a result, guilt and regret have been frequent visitors of late – the chorus of “coulda, woulda shoulda,” has been drowning out everything else, leaving me anxious and unsettled.

Then last Monday night I dreamed of Jordan again.

It came on the tail end of that brief, deep sleep that occurs after you’ve woken at 4 and struggled for an hour or more to get back to sleep – desperate to get more rest before the alarm pulls you from bed. He wasn’t even on my mind – it was work that kept me tossing and turning.

The dream began in what seemed to be a living room. He was on the couch sitting beside Lucas and I could tell they were enjoying each other’s company. His hair was a little long, but his face was clean and his eyes were bright and he looked so healthy and was smiling so beautifully. I smoothed his hair away and cupped his face in both my hands and I could see him so clearly – right down to the freckles on his nose. And I said “I know you, I remember you, I knew you were in there” and I kissed his face over and over.

And then in the next moment, in that surreal kind of time travel that only occurs in dreams, we were in a tunnel of some sort. Like a parkade or an underground walkway. It was filled with people and I realized that Lucas and Jordan had gone on ahead. I came around a corner and there was Jordan – stark naked, lying in a fetal position in the middle of the tunnel while everyone walked around him.

And my immediate reaction, the thought that stayed with me as I came awake, was “Oh – I see. He was always ill. He was always going to get ill. There was nothing I could have done.”

It was such a powerful moment. I was afraid to move, afraid to breathe even, as I lay there trying hard to hang on to the dream in hopes of discerning more meaning from it.

Theresa Caputo, the Long Island Medium, often tells her clients that dreams are our loved ones way of communicating with us. It’s a nice thought isn’t it – that the dream was Jordan reaching out to tell me to forgive myself. All I know is that I’ve been able to breathe a little easier this week.