January 22, 2008

• Years Pass and Dreams Continue

  [Note: I added content and re-wrote this Dec 18, 2007 post on Jan 21, 2008]

  The wee hours between Dec 14 and 15 last week marked 15 years since the unexpected suicide of my partner when I was 20.  I was a junior in college and it was my first experience with death, as well as with suicide.  Losing her like that completely shattered my naive universe.  Within a matter of hours it had gone from life seeming normal and mostly benign to upside down and excruciating.  Without warning, the person I felt closest to in the world at the time was dead and gone.  Not even a chance for formal goodbyes first.  Much to my later appreciation, the woman tasked with telling me we hadn’t found her in time after all was kind, gentle, loving, and compassionate beyond measure despite having been a complete stranger earlier in the evening.  Rationally I understood the concept of death, knew it happened all the time, and that it would happen to each of us; but I thought, Eventually, not Now.  And certainly not without warning and adequate opportunity for goodbyes.

  The suddeness and shock blocked my rational understanding of death, and her actual passing was something that initially eluded my comprehension.  Upon hearing the news, with torrential tears streaming from terrified eyes I kept shouting bewilderedly at that nice stranger: “Wait, do you mean that she died?  She DIED?  So she is Dead?  Actually DEAD?  Dead like never coming back, Dead?  DEAD dead?”  I was answered very patiently, repeatedly by this gentle stranger that yes, such was indeed the case.  My world had utterly stopped turning.  I was baffled to notice that life all around me continued on without any pause. The rain continued to fall, the stars continued to shine, and people went on with the basics of daily living. But the utter devastation, loss, emptiness, aloneness, and lost-ness I felt so acutely that night, and so strongly for many years thereafter, profoundly altered me as well as the course of my life.

  The intensity of my experience of grief was so overpowering it moved me to leave the college I loved after my junior year. Until then, I felt comfortable and connected there, like I really belonged.  I felt proud to be getting my bachelors degree there. I loved the very liberal atmosphere and very liberal politics of our school, and being an involved student-athlete had become a major part of my identity.  I was ‘out’ and accepted as lesbian, I had developed a wonderful circle of close friends, and though only a junior I had been elected co-captain of the varsity field hockey team I especially enjoyed.  However, while I did manage to stick out spring term that year, I had found being there where I was surrounded by reminders of who and what I had lost was more upsetting than comforting, and I was still so raw and wounded and depressed that it was just too painful for me to go through with my senior year.

  All had not been totally smooth in my life until that fateful night, but that trauma was enough to push me over the edge of tolerable angst and grief into a dangerous dance with depression that in turn brought me frighteningly close to suicide myself.  So, the next year in the interest of survival I sought the solace I needed by backpacking for several months on the Appalachian Trail.  Simplifying my life to focus on the primeval rhythms of walking, eating, and sleeping while remaining immersed in the nature that nurtures my soul was what I needed to begin restoring my spirit and start my healing journey.  During that year I also got sober, and thankfully remain so still.  When I came off the trail I settled back in the place my parents called home and transferred my college credits to a school there.  As I was able to focus, I gradually took courses, finally finishing my bachelors there 5 years after the death of my partner.

  One thing that continues to puzzle me is that despite years upon years of conventional therapy and a rainbow of alternative healing therapies, I continue – and not infrequently – to have extremely vivid dreams where I go back to my first college on a quest to complete the bachelors degree there that I began there.  While at the time remaining on campus for my senior year seemed to be beyond my ability, in choosing to leave I felt a great loss around giving up my world there.  I know a part of me died when my partner died, and I think another part of me died when I left my life there.  It was ten years until I felt ready to return for a visit, and in doing so at that point I reconnected with some old friends (including the kind and gentle stranger who had since become a dear friend), roamed the campus, and thought I had made my peace with my past there. Some I’ve shared about all this with think it odd that I have these recurrent dreams about returning to complete my bachelors there since I finished it elsewhere. And yet, the dreams have continued.

  In the dreams, it is as though my having already completed the degree elsewhere is irrelevant, or that it was not valid — that somehow it just did not “count”. In some of these dreams I am 35 (like in my waking life) and all the students are strangers to me and so very young, and I feel really old and like an odd outsider who no longer really fits there. In others, many of the students I had been friends with are also back there, yet I still feel like an outsider since I was so altered by traumatic grief and they had remained quite unchanged.  Sometimes in the dream I have chosen coursework to complete my degree that is quite different than what I actually took at college, and it either feels uncomfortably foreign or exciting to chart a new course of study there.  Sometimes the coursework feels too hard.  But most commonly in these dreams I feel very surprised and disappointed to discover that my prior sense of self and the belonging and connection I once felt so strongly there is now absent, and I feel sad and lonely and ashamed and have a lot of anxiety about being there, yet I still feel compelled to stay there and try to finish anyway.

  Occasionally, I dream about returning to high school years later to complete a requirement that I somehow missed, or I dream about stressful jobs I once had and discover much to my distress that I am thrust back there once again, or even dreams where I have to completely re-make the moves (geographic relocations) I’ve already made (the actual packing and unpacking and goodbyes, etc).  But those are infrequent while the dreams I have about my college situation are far more common. In them, feeling like an outsider where I once felt such a sense of belonging seems to be a major recurring theme, and the focus on the degree is prominent, as is awareness of and sadness over how different I am from who I was before the death. I have wondered at times if I have some subconscious need to literally return to campus to complete the degree there to close an unfinished circle, but it seems more likely there is a more symbolic meaning I still haven’t really resolved and still can’t quite grasp after all these years.

  Just a few days after Dec 18 (the date I originally wrote this entry) I had
  some sort of emotional/ energetic/ anxiety episode in the afternoon which left
  me feeling quite unsettled.  Then later in the middle of the night I then woke up vomiting violently with no other discernable physical illness until my stomach was quite empty, with no subsequent vomiting.  Two
  days later I went to an energy-worker/ healer/ massage-therapist friend I’ve gone to upon visits
  home for many years, and his observation about our session was that I let
  go of and cleared out more dark stuff that day than I had in all the years he
  had known me.  Also interestingly, since that physical and metaphysical purging I have not had that dream again.  I
  don’t know if I ever will or not again since only a month has passed, but I like to think it is possible that the impromptu and synchronistic dream-writing/ vomiting/ clearing process has laid to rest that recurring dream!

  • 2:18 am
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