this is a repeat of a blog entry from 08/14/04, in memory of a grand dame, and dedicated to sara jane (especially), a grand grown up dame herself and to my daughters and their children and beyond ....
8/14/2004 7:23:07 PM ... if this was truly one of my "lists," i'd have to call it, "ten or more reasons why i don't like to sleep late!" ... THE DREAM I HAD THIS MORNING WHILE "SLEEPING IN"....
I dreamt that I was preparing to bathe Grandma's body again, but this time I was having trouble preparing what I needed to do so, and her body was on a table outside, covered with a white canvas. Someone had set an ashtray on the canvas-covered table. I didn't have my contacts in or my glasses on. Everything I did was stumbly-bumbly and blurry. When I finally withdrew the cloth in order to bring her body inside to wash it, she was only partly there, down to the bone, shattered in places, and part of her (the skull) was made of broken cookies.
I balanced all of this, trailing the canvas, trying to bring her body into the space/kitchen where I'd be bathing her, but someone had put my computer on the table I had intended to use. I struggled to balance the strangely small and dried body parts (without my glasses) while trying to put the cookies (her skull parts) on a plate in a high cupboard. When I turned around, there was a room full of people "visiting" and I could see a storm brewing outside.
I tried looking for my glasses, found a pair on an end table that looked right in my myopic view, but when I put them on, they were sunglasses and the room just got blurry and dark. A lady in a chair, next to that table said, "Who is your family?" I said, "I'm a Cunningham. Do you know any Cunninghams," and she shook her head no. I said, "My grandmother was a ____mother's maiden name_____, do you know any ____________s?, and everyone else in the room shook their heads. Then they went on talking as if I was not there, and someone started messing with my computer that was still on the kitchen table.
I went into a very small, cramped bathroom with no windows, small in that airliner variety, and began rummaging in the medicine cabinet for my contacts. The case opened, and they spilled into the sink, multiple pairs. When I scooped them up, some of them were pitch black/opaque, and some the standard pale-ish blue Acu-Vue gel-like lenses. The AcuVues, the ones I needed, were covered with black specks. I was trying to find a pair to fit into my eyes, when the pressure in the small bathroom changed, which I took that to mean a tornado had hit the house.
Then I woke up.
Grandma's memorial service is tomorrow at her last place of residence, with her family and her "peeps." She lies across the street, having been buried in a small family service on Aug2. I'm sure the pending memorial and dinner partly explains the canvas cloth across the table and the cookies, but geez, the rest of it! I don't think I'm going to sleep late ever again.
And the real bathing, the most honorable and respectful act that I was able to perform after my grandmother's death, it went nothing like this, nothing like this at all ... and yet, I'd be at a loss to try and document how it "really" was as there are no true words that I can find to describe it, at least not yet. Until then it all just manifests as these broken blurry dreams.
