Tonight's picture was taken 16 years ago today. Mattie was 18 months old and as you can see he was busy playing with boxes. Which always made me laugh, as Mattie had all sorts of toys, but if boxes were around, he naturally gravitated to them. They served as the perfect building material for him!
Quote of the day: Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives. ~ William Dement
However, in my dream, I was traveling with Peter and Mattie. I could see that Mattie was healthy and wasn't dealing with cancer. Keep in mind that in real life, Mattie never visited Italy. So this is not a memory that I was building upon.
The dream had various scenes. Almost like watching a play in a way. In the first scene, all three of us were touring a big church in Italy. We were learning about the church's history and all the different parts that comprised the religious complex. Along the tour, the guide pointed out the "funeral area." An area where they stage a body before a service is performed for the bereaved family. My brain totally made this up because I have NEVER seen such a funeral area in a church. Any case that was scene one.
In scene two, Peter and I are walking around the church, but Mattie isn't with us. Instead, church personnel approach our tour group and tell us that many of the children we came with on tour are now dead. That they are in the "funeral area" and they advised us to go back to our hotels and get a change of clothing for our children, because these will be the clothes they will be buried in. The church implored all of us to come visit our child's body immediately in the funeral area.
In scene three, I am feeling confused because in my mind Mattie is safe and couldn't have possibly died. So I disregard the church personnel. I neither get clothes for Mattie nor visit the funeral area. At this point, I don't remember what happens. I have no memory of how we got from Italy back home to the USA. I also have no idea if I realized Mattie wasn't with us!
However, scene four, I am home. We are sitting on our couch and apparently watching a documentary on the cathedral we visited in Italy. We are both fascinated by the show because we were recounting how we just visited that space months before. The problem is in the documentary, they began talking about the "funeral area." To illustrate what the area looked like and how it is used, they show us bodies in the area waiting to be processed. When I see the bodies on TV, I realize that one of the bodies happens to be MATTIE. Unlike all the other bodies which were clearly dead, Mattie was sitting in the funeral area and he was moving around and talking. He was NOT dead, and the documentary was able to prove this to me.
It is within scene five, that I realize I should have listened to the church personnel. I should have checked the funeral area and if I had Mattie would still be alive today. Because I did not check, the church buried Mattie. I have no idea, buried alive or whether Mattie was killed. My brain did not provide more details than this, which I suppose is fortunate, given the disturbing nature of this dream.
I am sure someone could have a field day with this dream. I do not think it is coincidental that I should have this dream now given that I testified this week before the National Academies of Sciences on the impairments Mattie had from cancer treatment, or the submission on palliative care that I wrote yesterday. To speak and write about these topics causes me to reflect back on very difficult times, and as such these emotions are reflected in my dreams. Loss of control and the inability to prevent Mattie's death are at the top of the list.
This afternoon, we took Sunny for a walk on Roosevelt Island. Sunny was the one who spotted two white tailed deer.
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