My father died, in reality, of colon cancer that had spread to his liver, having lived for two years with the varied discomforts and indignities of a colostomy and chemo. He was in hospice. My mother and I were by his side and had been all day. We had been playing some of his favourite music and, alas, "Elvira" by the Oak Ridge Boys was the song he went out on ("giddyup!"). He opened his eyes, seemed to look off into something in the far distance... and his breathing slowed and stopped; he seemed to -- I mean nothing supernatural by it -- "leave" his body, moving towards whatever it was he was looking at, while the rest of him faded away, changed from human to corpse before our eyes. I think there was some machine monitoring his pulse that might have confirmed this was happening; it was very clear. My mother and I were both crying, but we were definitely there, and he knew it, though he was having great trouble communicating that day, was barely acknowledging there were people in the room, not really able to speak.
In the dream, which came to me for no reason I can understand, my father had not been sick at all, but had some weird thing happen in his head that he didn't understand (and that I don't recall the details of -- some mild aneurism or such). He was nervous about it, but also not making a huge deal of it; he seemed okay. He and my mother were living in a somewhat different building, with some of the features of the place they used to live in, but in an upstairs suite (in reality, since my father was the building caretaker, they lived downstairs in "the big suite" of the building; in the dream, this was turned into some sort of bingo hall/ movie theatre/ social space). Like I say, he seemed okay, but the episode was disturbing.
The next day, I had been planning a road trip with some friends -- including one guy who actually disappeared from my life around the time my father died. He was the driver, in the dream, and determined to continue the road trip, but I was insisting that I had to check in with my parents first, because I was worried. Besides, I had forgotten my cell phone at their apartment (I didn't even have a cell phone at the time of my father's death, but I didn't want to go on a road trip without it). We were sitting in a car in an underground parking lot arguing, and finally I just got my stuff out of the trunk -- I was packing my CPAP machine, because we had been planning to stay overnight somewhere, maybe going to Vancouver Island -- and I told my friends I would see them later, and walked back to my parents' apartment. There were some hard feelings that I wasn't going, but it seemed important that I not join them; they thought I was being foolish, but I didn't care.
When I arrived, the people in the building who I met were very friendly to me, but no one said anything about my father. They were coming out of some sort of social event, a film screening I think, that had happened in that big social area downstairs. The ones I talked to were not in fact actual tenants' in my parents' last building; I think my brain switched them out for coworkers of mine at my present job. I spoke with a couple of them; then, as I was going upstairs to my parents' suite, a male tenant (a completely fictional character, I think -- my dreaming brain recognized him, but I don't think he was anyone I really knew) was coming downstairs and said to the people behind me, "Has anyone told Allan that his father died?"
I was not entirely surprised. "You just did," I said. And then I had a conversation or two about it, I -- about how he'd had some sort of neural episode, was thrashing in his bed, in pain, saying that his head was on fire. Then he just died. My mother was talking to someone, getting some counselling (whoever told me this said "she's being processed now," which seemed an odd way to put it). Their suite was locked. I went to the elevator and was going to get on it when my mother got off, and we hugged, crying.
That's about all I remember. At some point I was back downstairs in the social space talking to people about my father and what had happened. I was very glad I had not gone on the road trip. People were very kind...
Why my brain chose to rewrite the scenario, I have no idea, but I woke up remembering a lot more than I usually do of my dreams. And now I'm doing something on the Dayglo Abortions -- my next post; their singer just survived the kind of cancer that killed my father, and went through some of the indignities he suffered, so that might explain a little of the timing, but...
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