Death and Dreaming

 Maybe it’s my high school reunion next weekend, maybe it’s the random articles about suicide awareness a social worker friend has been posting on Facebook, but I’ve been having Scott dreams this week. I’ve more or less accepted that I’m going to have these for the rest of my life. Anyway.

Last night I dreamed that I was walking through a cemetery in the town we lived in in high school, and this tall, fair-skinned, dark-haired young woman I didn’t know was walking with me. She said that she’d known Scott at the end of his life, and had tried to make a difference, yelling at him at times. I thanked her, and said I understood that it was his choice and there was nothing anyone could have done. She then suggested that we look for his grave…..I agreed, and as we wandered a fog started rolling in. I remembered that Scott was buried in the town his grandparents moved (back) to after we graduated high  school, and realized everything this woman had said was a lie. The fog blurred everything away, and all of a sudden I was sitting with Scott. We chatted for a bit, I don’t remember the specifics, and then I said "Look, you handled your stuff, but how on earth do I live with it for the next sixty years? I’m an emotional wreck, and I’m angry." Then he handed me a cheap copy of Oswald Chambers’s My Utmost for His Highest and I was so furious I woke up. 

I don’t know. It’s hard to balance the reality….that if I had made different choices, he probably wouldn’t have died in 2005. Had I made the phone calls, had I gone to college in the same part of the state (Like I should have. We should have left that place we went to high school together- we lived there as not-completely accepted foreigners together), had I not let him disappear. But I couldn’t have held his hand forever….at some point, he had to choose life on his own. If he could have gotten past that crisis in 2005, would he have chosen life? I’d like to think so, but nothing guarantees that  (Maybe I’d like to think that in choosing graduate school, marriage, my cat, I’ve irrevocably chosen life for myself?).

My own life looks so different than it did in 2005. I’ve been with my partner for three and a half years (married for almost two). I have a graduate degree, I’m working on another. I love my work, and I finally published a paper I’m proud of, on one of the greatest adventures in my life. I don’t know why I feel like I’m losing him again lately….why so many times I find myself closing my eyes, seeing his stupid flame shirts, with his baggy shorts and hair gelled into hard spikes, his arms covered in random inkpen drawings by his friends, hoping I’m still seeing him as he really was. These last couple years I feel like I’m having to stretch so far back into the past to reach him, like his memory is slipping out of my grasp.