We crashed down into bed and I was grateful it was her nap time. I needed to hide under the covers and do nothing. She nursed throughout, so my sleep was tussled. But we snuggled in bed for over three hours. I needed that.
When she woke up, I asked her father to take her. I moved from the girls’ room to “the big bedroom” and crawled back under the covers. This room is dark, the curtains and shades almost always drawn. I wasn’t tired, exactly, but I was exhausted. Rolling in and out of sleep, mostly lying curled in a ball of stillness with my eyes closed, my mind drifted. Save the time of breakfast/getting my older daughter to school around 7 and the long nap with the baby, I’d been awake and thinking since before four this morning. Lying still. Not wanting to move. Eyes closed, but not really sleeping. Just like I was now, at noon on a weekday. Still with my eyes closed.
And then I woke up sobbing. Not just tears in my eyes, but really hard crying. This has never happened to me before, and I didn’t know it was possible. This is what I dreamed:
I was in a hospital room with only the dim florescent light at the head of the bed. The curtains were drawn around the section of the room holding the patient slightly sitting, mostly laying back, still. I was in a plastic and metal chair at the side of the bed. I may have been holding her hand, I may have been just sitting close, though I could tell the hand was already cold. The circulation in her body had slowed. She looked at me, almost still inside. She was crying. She asked me, through telepathy, through our minds, will you do it now? I said quietly, calmly, through our minds, I already have.
Did you cut the wires?
I did. The power is cut.
Did you turn off the medicine?
I did. Nothing is coming through.
She looked at me. She was almost vacant. She didn’t cry, she didn’t smile, she didn’t squeeze my hand to let me know it was going to be okay. I didn’t smile, or cry, or squeeze her hand in reassurance either.
And then she died. She was gone and empty. She became a shell of a body.
And I woke up crying.