Please stop

"It's a dream baby, it's a beautiful one, but you know dreams... " from What Dreams May Come

I cannot even begin to tell you all of the ways the photograph in this post is imperfect.  The blurriness of the photo itself, the situation it was taken in, the melted conditions of the ice that day.  I could actually go on and on about this photo, but I'll spare you.  Suffice it to say, I've had much more perfect moments than the one I captured here.

I've been doing a lot of thinking since my dream two nights ago. The dream where I was so deeply asleep that it took me a little bit of time to realize that my own mother was talking to me in the dream. And when I finally figured out, mid-conversation that it really was her voice, and she really was talking, and it was about current stuff - stuff that has happened since she died - I was so amazed about the entire thing that I woke myself up from the very middle of that dream to make sure that I recognized in my waking state, that it really did happen.

The dream, that is. Or maybe it was an other-worldly visitation, I will never know for sure, but I can tell you it just felt so completely real. And so completely normal.

It was like any other ordinary moment between she and I, talking about normal day-to-day life stuff, me complaining and fretting a bit, and her calming and dotting her paragraphs with timely insight. The ordinariness of the whole situation was the part that was so striking. This was no "What Dreams May Come" screenplay.

I could actually kick myself because after all of that trouble I went to in order to STOP the dream so I could wake up just enough to realize I was having the dream, I now cannot remember a single specific part about it. But it felt good, and meaningful and true, and like we were probably seated at the timeworn dinette my grandparents received as a wedding gift from their parents in 1932 and as we were usually apt to be, sitting over some coffee with cream and sugar, on a relatively sunny sort of day, the sky adorned with an occasional cloud.

I can vividly recall the heart-wrenching troubles that stemmed from her illness - the things that made me feel like a victim suffering the ravages of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  The last night before she entered hospice ranks right up there at the top of my list of experiences I wish I'd never had to endure.  Then the time I was trying to decide with my brother around noon on Mother's Day not where to take her for brunch, but if we should allow the doctors to place her on a ventilator in hopes of saving her life long enough to figure out if they could treat her cancer aggressively enough.  And another time spent agonizing over whether or not she was telling me to let her die on the third floor of a hospital in Tucson, Arizona, where I was outnumbered ten-to-one by overzealous first year residents and a professor who wanted to make an example out of the body lying in that hospital bed.  Save the one wise-beyond-this-world nurse who taught me not to make the death decision mine when it was still so clearly my mom's decision to make.  May God bless that woman to see her children's children grow old, whoever she was.

These are miniscule examples of the kinds of unimaginable pain and heartache and difficulty and sadness that no one ever wants to feel or witness or embrace, myself included.  Nevertheless, these events come into our lives, whether we want them to or not, perhaps as someone once bluntly put it "because no one rides for free".

The sorrow comes, folks, but none of our preparing and fretting and worrying about it now is going to make it any less sucky in the future. It won't make it hurt less if I anticipate the pain now and it certainly won't diminish my experience of loss if I start training myself to detach from sorrow prematurely.  This is the kind of stuff that is easy for me to know, but harder for me to do.  Questions come up for me like, how am I supposed to be joyful now when I know the end is coming, and the path heading that way is filled with pain and suffering?

I think my son may be walking this very earth because God knows I still need to learn this lesson of embracing the ordinary moments in life and being joyful today, no matter what, for what I have and what I experience.  It is easy sometimes to instead feel torn by previous losses and hell-bent on bracing myself for the next sack that is headed down field for me and what is left of my heart.  The only thing I am certain of in this moment, is that the fear of what may inevitably come down the line will paralyze me from feeling joy for what is happening now. The fear will sink in and rob me blind of getting to embrace and be grateful for what is right now, in the present moment, the present person, place or thing. This precious, ordinary moment, the very moment that will not pass this way again.

So consider stopping.

Stop preparing your heart to feel the blow less drastically by toughening up for those sorrows yet to come.  Stop checking the weather for the rainstorm, looking ahead for the car wreck and preparing your escape route from the scene of the accident.  Stop waiting for the other shoe to drop.  Consider instead living in the joy of the current, right now, totally present and totally imperfect moment.  What, right now, can you say "I am really grateful for that"?  Shout it out loud to your neighbors, tell your lover, share it with your children.

Because all the preparing in the world won't make the sorrow less sorrowful but it certainly has the power to disconnect us from life, and to make our current joy much less joyful.