2010 Rewind PART 2 ~Thanksgiving and the Aftermath of Loss~

Warning: this post is a bit of a downer. With creepy dreams thrown in too. Mostly I just journalled this stuff to try to figure out later.

Thanksgiving, just a week after Nana went Home to Heaven, was weird. It was bittersweet for those of us missing her. In a good way it was nice because it brought us all together when it would otherwise have been a divided family affair spent each with out little respective families acrost the country. My mother's sisters came, one from the other end of the country and one from several hours away. We decided to forego Thanksgiving as usual with my husband's family in order to be with my family at this difficult time also. It was really nice to see everyone but it still felt empty. My mom and her sisters and brother decided to go ahead and have it at Nana's house- now my uncle's house. It had already been planned for Nana's and she had the meal planned out and groceries bought so they went ahead and had it there just as she would have wanted. But it was insanely difficult to visit and walk around Nana's home and know she was not there and I would never see her again this side of Heaven. I won't get a chance to tell her I love her again, or to ask her about her childhood again, or to see my kids grow up knowing and loving her and her calling them "fweetie" like she did me when I was little.

Not long after my grandpop's death last year I dreamt that I was in their house with Nana and I could see the spirit of my grandpop walking down the hall. I saw him several times walk down the hall and each time he got younger and younger until he was the grandpop I remember from when I was little. I told Nana in the dream, that he was waiting for her. She said through her tears, "I can't I just can't think of that now... not yet. I have to be where I'm at." I turned from Nana and walked down the hall again and then turned around to walk back to the kitchen, and there was grandpop walking toward me and he had something in his arms and he was beaming, just radiant, joy coming off him. I saw a tiny head of dark hair and he was smiling into the tiny face and I knew it was a baby girl. As he got closer I tried to look at the baby's face to see who she was but I did not recognize her. From the side she looked like my own daughter but when I saw her face I knew she was not. Grandpop walked through me and vanished. That was the last time I dreamt of him. I thought the baby might be Carrie- his daughter that was his secondborn after my uncle: she died when she was a newborn. The joy on his face as he looked at that baby in his arms was so overwhelming that it made me cry. I woke up sobbing but feeling comforted.
After Nana's passing I did not have such a comforting dream. First there was a plague of insects coming out from under the bed and pouring out of an old dirty dilapidated car and everything was in dark dingy colors like everything was old and dirty. I was strangely unconcerned about the insects. I thought we should do something about them, and I thought they were icky, but I would stomp them and go on about my day without being disrupted or deterred. Then the colors were back and I was running through the corridors of a hospital. It was like a maze and everything was this burnt orange color. I had to get to Nana to say goodbye. My husband was with me. We finally found her. The room was dark with a fuzzy candlelight quality. In the room was my grandpop's body on the bed, and Nana was sitting in a chair at the foot of the bed but not too close, but she looked dead. When I got close to her, I saw that she was there but not registering anything. I knelt in front of her and started to cry. She suddenly focused on me for one second with crystal clarity. Her eyes lit up and she said lovingly with delight, "My little Jessie!" and then she died. Then both bodies were gone and one of my aunts looked at my mom, other aunt, and uncle, and said, "Okay well what now?" and everyone picked up their things to leave except Uncle Bob who stayed in his chair. I wanted to scream, "How can you just move on like that?! What do you do with the pain?!" but I held my tongue. Then I woke up.