I woke up from a dream today

It was mom and dad again. They weren’t young, as I knew them when they were together in my faded memories as a toddler or in the envelopes of one hour photo prints in the old drug store bags. mom was looked the same as she did this fall. Soft grey baby hairs laying flat on her head, a little fuzzy blanket that began to grow after the chemo stopped working. After the treatments stopped. Her legs were atrophied but her body atill round from steroids. The skin on her face white, falling loose around her chin like it aged 13 years in 2. It looked like we were on a beach, planning to have a picnic. There was no sky or whatever because it was white with light, light that looked and felt like heaven. Light bright enough to see my dad’s face, a face that didn’t look the way it did16 years ago preserved in his casket. The white light illuminated him in an age progression photo, a rough one. His lifestyle hadn’t killed him but the toll it took on his body showed. Yellow with scattered age spots. His shoulders were rounded with a buffalo hump on the back of the neck, long thinning, greasy unkept hair.

Dad walked over to the other side of the canopy, to grab a beer and laugh with faint figures of people I couldn’t see. I knew my mom was sad. That’s when I saw his face. I walked around to him and finally had the chance to tell him he needed to be there, from my heart. I looked at him the way I can look at people on a good day, where it doesn’t strike me with fear to make eye contact when talking to strangers in the check out line. I told him he can’t leave her alone like this, all she wanted was for thing’s to be ok. And he understood.

The next thing I know they’re laughing. Everything felt perfect and right and serene and I felt more present in this dream state than I have in my real life in a year. He was tickling her, chasing her to me with an action figure like my 7 year old son. My mom ran out of breath, Joe I need to lye down. There was a green bench, us three cuddle up like a family. My mom’s leg starts to tremor, the way it did in November. A few short day after her birthday. I held her hand and she still died terrified. My dad, he thinks he’s trying to play again. I gently tell him no, this is what happened. Make her comfortable. She lays her fuzzy head on his waist and she smiles, she’s wearing the flesh covered compression sleeve on her right arm, but you couldn’t see the purple necrotic tumors climbing out, not like before. She’s comfortable. She’s more comfortable than the fentynal the morphine  the lorazepam could have ever made her. And she dies in Heaven. In the laps of my dad and I. And then I wake up. My lap is empty. They’re gone and I’m here.

And it’s not magical. It’s not perfect. I’m adult but I don’t feel like one, I feel like a wounded child who’s parents are dead. They will always be dead.  Im 31, a single mom of two on welfare whos too depressed to do laundry.  And nothing feels like heaven.