learning to dance all over again

I woke up crying this morning all because my husband came to bed with me last night.

There’s a room in my mind and the walls of that room are shelved from floor to ceiling. All my griefs, dreams and heartaches are stacked neatly row upon row on those shelves, though, not all the shelves are yet filled.

It’s a place where only I can go and rarely do. Mostly I keep that door locked shut but every so often a storm blows in and batters down that door. When that happens, there is no cure but to mount the stairs to that room and stand alone in the midst of my heartbreak. As one by one, all the hurt and pain of a lifetime of grieving comes falling down on my head.

I never know what ill wind will blow down that door but it always happens when its least expected. That’s what happened today, all because my husband came to bed last night. He slipped right in beside me, in the room I share with my daughter, as if he has never been gone and it’s the most natural thing in the world that we share a room with a daughter.

We spent a long time catching up and talking about the children, and just when I felt finally secure enough to trust his presence and was drifting safely towards sleep listening to the soft cadence of his voice; he told me that he had to go. When I protested, he told me he had stayed far longer than he was allowed and just as suddenly as he came, he left. And just like the first time, he left me crying all alone to struggle with my grief in the dark.

The Roma believe that when one dreams of another, your soul has reached out and left your body to meet the other in the realm of the neither-world; the only place where souls can safely meet and interact. I have only dreamed once before of my husband. The night my youngest son was born. I still remember that dream vividly.

We were riding in the back seat of a car under a strange city’s underpass when an oncoming car swerves and crosses into our lane, hitting the car we were traveling in head on. Our friends in the front are killed instantly, but somehow I survive and manage to pull him from the car. I cradle him in my lap on the road as he lay dying.

I beg, I cry, I plead with him and my G-d not to leave me. Suddenly, his mouth gasps and his body contracts and I see his soul rise up. I cried out to him not to go. And for a minute he pauses only long enough to say that we will meet again in the next life, and this time, we would have a life together. He promises that when we meet again, we will have the five children I always wanted. And this time, he will build me the house I always dreamed of. I didn’t get the five children and the house I cannot bear to visit.

For a long time I believed in the common wisdom that time heals all wounds, but it wasn’t until my own griefs came calling, one by one, that I learned just how untrue that was. The passing of time gives one space to distance and separate one’s sense of self from the grief, but with every new loss the old ones come tumbling back home to visit.

Nor had I realized until I had experienced my own griefs that grief had a physical dimension and a tangible sense of weight. I had just thought it was a state of mind, a feeling, and not the weight or cost of being. Now I know better, but I am not sure it has left me wiser. And now I have to go and batten down that door so that I can once again - buck up, as I have children to raise and a life to live.