Personal Journal

Flashback

I’m having recurring airport/train station dreams. Alien cities with futuristic devices. Huge throngs of people, sometimes in a foreign country. I have to find a place rest, and there’s no place that I’m entirely secure. I can’t put my belongings anywhere. I can’t sleep for fear of losing my belongings, or fear that I won’t be awake when my exit comes.
It’s a helluva lot better than my past recurring dream theme, for certain.

I’m at work now. Fatigued already. But I think I can get through the day – I have more work than I can finish today. That’s the way I like it.

I remember that as I was trying to fall asleep last night, I had a flashback of sorts about Jean. The hot flashes. The swelling in her brain … this is what killed her, essentially. The cancer grew, the body sent things to try to deal with the problem, which increased the swelling. And the pressure inside her head finally pushed outward enough to cause the brain stem to be unable to function properly. Hot flashes were the first signs that the brain stem was beginning to fail. Jean’s temperature would spike to 103 in a matter of minutes, and she’d sweat profusely, and be a little bit fussy. When she was able to give signs, I could tell she was in pain. Eventually I just began giving her morphine on the timetable they recommended.

That really is a flashback. No feelings then, but feelings now. I remember last night lying there in bed comforting Jean in my mind. “I’m so sorry, my kitten,” I said to her. I stroked her forehead again in my mind, and padded her face with a cold washrag again, and I spoke softly in the bed as if I were there again.

She was dying and every single effort I could make to try to be of comfort seemed inadequate. I felt like a parent losing his child. Not like a man losing his love. I mean, that existed too, and exists now as the most common sense of it that I have. But at that moment, with the fever and such, I felt like a parent. Is that because Jean was helpless? It might also be because at the end, her functionality regressed more and more to the level of a child.

Those lasts breaths. How I hate knowing that those memories are in there. The last two breaths she ever took. I should think of them as somehow positive, as they released her.
But all I can think is “Oh dear god, no.”


It is never too late to be what you might have been. -- George Eliot
Courage to start and willingness to keep everlasting at it are the requisites for success. -- Alonzo Newton Benn