a dream

Lev came to me in a dream last night, or at least I dreamt he did. This is my second dream with Lev coming back in this way (The other one was a few years ago.). He was around fourteen, and standing somewhere nondescript. He was quiet as was I, but I went up to him and gave him a good hug.
Then I woke up. Liana was next to me in bed, hugging me. I tried to stay with the dream, and pull it into memory. Some people would call it a visitation and a dream where Lev comes back for a hug is the most spiritual experience I have had. I still don't think his spirit is out there in any form anything like him. If it were he would come back more often. It would be nice to believe, but I don't feel it often enough.

This dream came after another dream a few nights prior where Lev had come back. I knew he had been dead, but he was back and I let him go to camp because he really wanted to. He hadn't aged. Toward the end of the week at camp I got very concerned about his not returning, and not being able to see him, and next thing I knew I was curled in fetal position, sobbing - in the dream.

I woke up tired, but dry-eyed.

I think both these dreams were triggered by a couple things happening. One is that we went away for the weekend and came home. Coming home is always hard for me. We come home and Lev isn't here. Every time. Again and again. Whether it's one night or a week, it emphasizes the emptiness of the house and his missing from our lives. I can reason away where Jaal is, but the naked truth of Lev's being gone is always raw.

A few weeks ago I was reading a book for a book group I'm in and I had read it for a week or so before I realized it was bothering me. It was about a clash between cultures (Hmong and US) but it centered around a little girl with epilepsy. She kept having seizures, but it wasn't until the book mentioned a status seizure that I realized the book was slowly eating away at the padding I have created around the memories of Lev's death. I have a theory, based on nothing really and probably not biologically correct, about how memories are stored. Traumatic memories tend to recur in their original force, unlike other memories that fade. With something so traumatic as the sudden loss of a child, those memories are at first incredibly fresh and it is hard to get beyond the actual horror. Over time, the memory does not fade, but padding, a barrier of some sort, it created around the memory, encapsulating it. It is intact, but it is not accessed on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Our bodies protect ourselves from it. And then sometimes a book, an experience, a smell, a word like seizure (even though Lev's multi-hour status seizure was nothing like a typical seizure), pokes a little hole in the padding. It punctures the barrier protecting the memory, and with enough punctures the full memory emerges in all its glory. So, sometimes things happen to create better access to the trauma, and usually they can be padded up and closed off once again, but sometimes the memory sort of leaks out until it is finally opened, released, and then allowed the walls to be built again.

I go to bed wishing for another dream with Lev and the ability to hold him close, knowing that it probably won't happen again for a while.

So, that's how it is, five and a half years later. We are usually okay, but it isn't easy.

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Posted By Rebecca to Life With Lev at 2/10/2016 07:30:00 PM