With apologies to Haley Joel Osment, I see dead people … in my dreams.
They’re not dead in the dream. They’re people I love who are no longer with us, but they live in my dream and it means a lot to me.
Three of them are in this picture. My mother is standing with her parents on the front porch of her childhood home, maybe my favorite place to have spent time in the entire world. For most of my tween years, I spent two weeks there every summer, playing baseball, reading library books and collecting pop bottles to turn in and buy comic books and baseball cards.
My grandfather Paul — I bear his name as my middle name — died in 1985 at age 89. My grandmother Florence died five years later at 94. They were married 64 years and lived in that same house for more than 60 of those years.
My mother lived in that house for all of her childhood and adolescence before leaving for college in Chicago. She lived to be 93 and died in 2020. I have rarely dreamed about her or my late dad, but my grandparents have made numerous appearances in my dreams.
Strangely enough, the dearly departed person I have dreamed about the most is my longtime friend Tom. We met in 1965 and were friends till he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 2016. The picture is of him when he was young and was one of those shown at his funeral. Tom and I were in the same profession and we actually both worked for the same conglomerate in our final jobs.
We were treated very differently in cutbacks. He got a year’s severance pay and health insurance working for the flagship paper. I got dumped unceremoniously working for one of the poor relations.
Tom. and I had a mutual friend we’ll call Larry. It’s not his real name, but it isn’t Larry the Cable Guy’s real name either. Our Larry was as close a friend as either of us ever had, and for more than half a century he was one of my two closest friends in the world.
He changed, though, and he would be the first to admit it. He became much more assertive in dealing with memories from a painful childhood and our friendship faded and almost died. I was ready to write it off and probably would have except that two of the dearly departed came to me in a dream.
It was an odd setting. Tom and my mother, both of whom loved Larry, were in my grandparents’ house. They reminded me how important a friend Larry had been to me, and how for better or for worse, our friendship had been one of the defining things of my life. They reminded me that just because someone was no longer a best friend, that didn’t mean he couldn’t be a friend at all.
They told me that things said to me that I considered unforgivable were only unforgivable if I made them so. There are so many things in my life I can no longer do at my age. That shouldn’t be one of them.
Imagine my surprise at being able to learn from people who are no longer with me.