My husband was in my dreams last night, for the first time in many months. It was similar to other dreams I’ve had about him, where he had failed in his suicide attempt and was still with me, but I was watching him like a hawk, afraid he would try it again. There was something about sleeping pills… but I woke from this dream in the deepest part of the night, fell back asleep, and didn’t recall any details by the time the alarm rang in the morning.
When I logged into my computer today, the top story on my Yahoo home page was about scientist Stephen Hawking, who was quoted as saying that the afterlife “is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.” My husband, a scientist himself and an avowed atheist when he was alive, would absolutely have agreed with that. I sat at my desk and wondered, is it foolish for me to want to believe that some part of him still exists somewhere? My dream last night, and most of my dreams about him, can be explained as just my brain trying to process his loss. Even the two dreams I have had that felt like something more, something real, could just be wishful thinking.
But I keep going back to the feeling that I had the first time I stood in the place where he took his life… the overwhelming sense of peace. I don’t think that was just wishful thinking, just wanting to feel something, because until that moment I wasn’t expecting to feel a thing. I wasn’t like some of his family, desperate for a sign that he was in heaven. Until that moment, I believed he was just gone, had entirely ceased to exist. The sense of peace that flowed over me didn’t come from me, not from my brain that was warped with shock and grief. I don’t know where it came from, but it made me question everything…
I’m still questioning. I still don’t have any answers. And maybe I am just telling myself fairy stories to make the darkness a little more bearable. Regardless, it felt good to see him last night.
So with you on this. My love and I were both scientists unconvinced about historical conceptions of gods, heaven, the afterlife, the lot. Even in the last week of his life, when he asked me if I thought there would be a life after death, I told him I didn’t know, but that I didn’t think so. He agreed. Now, I’m so ready to believe he’s somewhere, waiting, that we’ll be together again. I know it might just be my brain’s way of coping, self-delusional thinking, but there are thoughts that come to me, things that happen, that just seem so real and so independent of me. A scientist has to look at all possible evidence, accept that sometimes things can’t be explained immediately. If I dismiss these happenings as wishful thinking, am I closing myself off to something real? I’ve put science aside for now – it let me down – and I’m letting myself believe, but I don’t think it’s just me being desperate and sad. If anyone could find a way to connect with me from the ‘other side’, it would be my love. He’s like that.
Glad you’ve had another dream – I know how much you wanted to see him again, even if it’s not as happy as you’d wish. Hugs.
I remember standing beside the hospital bed, saying goodbye to my love after they had finally turned off the machines and admitted that he was gone. (I knew he wasn’t in there anymore the first time I saw him in the ER, several hours earlier, but that’s beside the point.) I remember saying to him, “Honey, if it turns out that we were wrong and there IS some kind of life after this one, will you find a way to let me kmow?” No sooner were the words out of my mouth than I laughed a little and said, “Never mind. No, you wouldn’t do that, even if you could.” Because he’d always scoffed at people who believed in things like that and was so vocal about how it was all a load of crap.
But later, after I had that feeling of peace at the place where he took his life, which included the strong sense of HIM continuing somehow, somewhere — I got to thinking. My love was a scientist and, as such, he was always curious, always wanting to test a new hypothesis, always willing to be proved wrong. Based on the information he had available to him while alive, he had concluded that there is no life after death. But if he died and discovered that he’d been wrong, that there really WAS some kind of afterlife, it would be totally like him to want to test all kinds of new theories about how that existence works, whether or not it’s possible to communicate with people in this world, etc.
me too – all of the above. But some of the things that have happened, both before and especially since, have been far too precise to be random, and have certainly NOT come from me or my own mind. I prefer those, as I can’t dismiss them as wishful thinking, or reading too much into things. Physical, external corroboration helps immensely.
And I agree, that sense of peace that descends is something wholly Other. Whatever any of it means, whether it is my love reaching through or across or no – for me, it means Something is there. Something is seeing and watching and caring. Something notices.
I’ve experienced that sense of peace, too. I don’t know about god or heaven or any of that. What I DO know that is that life is energy, and energy can neither be created nor destroyed — it only changes form. I can’t tell you what that means re: where your love is or what has happened to him, but I cannot believe we simply cease to exist.
Love that about energy just changing form. YES. Thank you.
Please pardon me while I laugh my ass off over Stephen Hawking’s “observation.”
I will freely admit that I would have agreed with him at one point in my life…but I have now experienced far too much personally, both within my own family and outside of it, to dismiss the afterlife as a “fairy tale.”
These days, I’m quite comfy with conversing with “the dead” – and Savannah makes an excellent point: Matter cannot be created nor destroyed, it simply changes form into Energy. E = mc squared, as Einstein would say. Perhaps Mr. Hawking needs to review his physics, eh?
I’m with Victoria and Savannah. I’m so glad you had another dream – even if it was anxiety-ridden. Even that might be a sign of some kind. I really like the idea of your love testing out theories and sort of playing around in whatever is after-life. Makes sense to me. I think though he is trying to be gentle and not intrude too much on your current life. I suspect there’s a pull to go onto whatever is the next adventure for a soul while at the same time, the soul wants to be near whatever bound it to this existence.