How Grief Changed My Dreams
No one prepared me for what could happen when I fall asleep
HOW ARE YOU FEELING?
Worried?
Winsome?
Full of wonder?
Full of gas?
Like you’ve got too many feelings and don’t know what to do with them?
On fire (in a good way)?
On fire (in a bad way)?
On fire (in a literal way?)?
I’M GRATEFUL FOR
My mom
Deodorant
Simon Rich’s writing
Waiting for the notification that my pizza was ready for pick up.
Car pulls in and parks next to me.
An older man gets out and unlocks the door to the small business next to Little Caesar’s.
He returns to car’s passenger side.
I try not to stare.
It must be his wife. She’s as old as him but needs a lot more helping getting out of the seat. Slow and steady. He’s there to help. So patient. They’ve clearly done this before, probably a lot. You can tell it’s not getting easier. She’s uneasy with every movement.
Finally she’s standing and out of the way for her husband to close the car door behind her.
Success.
Success? They’ve still got to make it inside.
Each step she takes is so tiny, like someone sabotaged her shoelaces together.
Her husband holds her up. Slow and steady. She’s slow, he’s steady. It doesn’t matter if it takes them all day. They’ll get there.
And I’m completely ignoring the pizza notifications on my phone.
The moment I saw the man open the passenger door, I felt a jolt of recognition. I understood their relationship immediately. I knew she wasn’t as healthy as she once was, and he was learning to be a caregiver.
Every step they took looked familiar. I’ve been there before. I recognized the nervous posture of the wife as she relied on her husband. I knew the poker face the husband wore as he tried to convince her that his patience came naturally. I saw my dad and I in them. It’s that feeling you get when you drive by your old high school. That used to be my life.
When my dad was still alive, I would talk about him onstage. I’d tell stories about his Alzheimer’s and where we were at in caring for him.
One of the bizarre things about Alzheimer’s is there’s no set timeline or order of when you lose what. It might take one person only a year before they don’t recognize family members, while it might look totally different for someone else. You just don’t know.
People love to give advice, though.
I remember a guy approaching me after a show.
“My grandma had Alzheimer’s.” He said. “I just want you to know that it’s going to get worse.”
I nodded a solemn look at him.
“And then it’ll get worse,” he continued, “and worse. And then you’re going to think it can’t get any worse, but it will. It’ll get a lot worse.”
I kept nodding, not sure where he was going with this.
“Ok. Bye.”
Wait. That was it?! I thought there was going to be some comfort at the end of that! Nope. Just Hey, just want to make sure you know that no matter how bad things are, they’ll get even worse. Have fun!
I got something similar a couple days after my dad died.
I got I message from—and I cannot stress this enough—a complete stranger. I didn’t know this guy at all. I don’t know, when, or how we became Facebook friends. But he sent me a message saying something along the lines of Sorry for your loss. I lost my dad a few years ago. People say you get over it, but you won’t. The pain will be with you for the rest of your life but you’ll learn how to deal with it. The end.
COOL!
Cool cool cool.
What a fun message! Hey, just want to let you know that I was where you are right now a couple of years ago and I still feel just as terrible as you feel now, but I’ve just gotten used to it. ENJOY YOUR LIFE! Maybe I don’t need to hear that right now, dude!
Even with the mountains of advice I received after my dad’s death, there was still one thing no on warned me about. No on prepared me for how strange it is to dream about a dead person.
You spend all this time grieving their death, trying to accept that they’re really gone. You know you’ll never form any new memories with them, no new pictures, inside jokes, or Christmases. What you have now is all you’ll ever have.
Then one night you fall asleep and your brain is like Have I got a surprise for you! And there they are. And you’re with them.
When you awake up, for a brief moment, it feels like you really do have a new memory with them, even though you know it’s not officially canon.
My number one reoccurring stress dream is being at Disney World on a crowded day and not getting to ride anything. I have to get my money’s worth! It’s so expensive to be here! Meanwhile in the stress dream, I’ve been wandering the park without a plan for 6 hours and still haven’t done anything.
One night, after my dad died, I had one of those dreams. I was at Disneyland and time was running out. Normally it’s just me racing around the park in the dream. I’m pretty sure I was at first in this one, but at some point I looked behind me and noticed my mom. Oh I guess we took this trip together? And then I saw my dad. Alive. Trying to navigate the overwhelming crowd with his walker, something he needed his last few years alive. It was definitely slowing us down and raising my heart rate, but I wanted us to stick together.
Some dreams he doesn’t have the walker. In some he’s as healthy as I knew him as a kid. In some he has Alzheimer’s. In some he still needs my mom and I to take care of him.
And you know what surprised me the most?
I’ll wake up from dreams where my dad is sick again and my first thought I miss that. I miss taking care of him.
The last week he was alive I had to help him take a shower one last time. I didn’t know it would be the last. I couldn’t see that far ahead. All I could focus on was the next step.
My dad was losing all mobility. Every step we took was an event. It was like he was learning to walk for the first time. He’d move his foot forward and I could feel his legs shake. His knees would start to buckle so I’d squeeze him tighter. He had fallen too many times on his own and he was scared of going down again. I tried to stay patient, reminding him that I was there.
It took ten minutes to walk twenty feet.
“I’ve got you.” I kept repeating. “I’ve got you.”
I was starting to see the world through his eyes. When we got to the shower door, the small step in looked impossible. It felt like I was asking him to hop onto a moving gondola. Somehow we made it.
My mom had installed railings in the shower months earlier, and my dad clung to them to hold himself up. All of his strength and focus went into holding on, but that wasn’t enough. He was leaning back, unable to keep his balance. I positioned myself behind him, using my body weight to keep him up.
Since his hands were already occupied, I had to do all the washing. I had never washed someone else before. I shampooed his hair. I used a wash cloth to scrub him down. I got his armpits, his chest, his back. I washed his butt. I washed my dad’s butt. I didn’t know what to expect an old man’s butt to feel like but it was surprisingly lumpy. Is this what my butt is going to feel like one day?
I turned off the water and dried him off so we could start the journey back to his bed.
We did it, I thought. I didn’t want to celebrate too early, we still had a long walk ahead of us, but I was so happy we made it through that.
If you had told me in that moment that one day I’d miss that, I don’t know if I could have believed you. But it’s true.
I have to say, this runs completely counter to the way I think when I’m the one who needs help. I’m so scared of being a burden to other people. I don’t want to bother anyone. I don’t want to ruin anyone else’s day by dumping my problems on them. Everyone has their own mess going on, and why should I force someone else to step into mine? I tell myself that it’ll only be a chore. No one actually wants to do it, but if I read out, someone will feel obligated to be there for me. I’d be forcing them to do it.
But there’s a special kind of joy that comes from being there for someone. To give. To sacrifice. To put someone else’s needs over your own. Obviously, this can go too far and turn into a savior complex where you only feel like you have worth if you’re fixing someone else’s problems, but there has to be a sweet spot. There’s a sense of honor that comes from someone trusting you with the heaviest parts of their life.
I miss having that. I miss taking care of my dad.
At the same time I can be so afraid to let anyone else take care of me. I want to be fine on my own. I want to figure it out myself.
I think that makes me selfish, right? I’m talking about how there’s this special type of secret joy that comes from caring for someone, and then getting nervous at the thought of someone being there for me. Do I think I’m the only one who can experience this type of joy? Like, no one else has ascended to this higher level of peace and understanding? As if I’ve got the purest of spirit, so what other people complain about, I find to be a wonderful blessing? That’s not true at all.
It’s paradoxical because it sucks and it’s great at the same time. It’s exhausting. It’s frustrating. But it can also be beautiful.
I don’t know if it’s something you can communicate to someone when they’re in the middle of caring for someone. Or at least I’m not sure of a way to say it where it could actually be heard.
Like, what if when I saw that elderly man helping his wife out of the car I just rolled down my window and said with a smug look Hey, one day you’re going to miss this.
Maybe I could say to someone One day you’ll dream about this and it might surprise you.
Live show in Dallas on October 19
I’m bringing my comedy storytelling show to Dallas in October.
For tickets and more info go to followtaylor.com/dfw
Love you like a neighbor,
Taylor Johnson
You don't know how much I needed to read this today. Thank you for being real.