SUCH A LONG WAY

Mother came to me seventeen years after she died. I remain convinced it was not only a dream. The first time I had sleep paralysis, long before this dream, I was an undergraduate staying at a friend’s house. As I lay there immobile in the dark, my then quite-alive mother came into the room. I listened to her bump lightly into furniture because she didn’t know the bedroom. I never saw her face. My body reanimated before she reached me and, though shaken, I knew the hallucination for what it was. But this time, so many years later, I saw her. I had been asking Gary, my husband dead three years, to come. But she did.

Someone gets into bed with me and embraces me, spoons my back, but won’t speak. I think it is Stephen, my lover. He isn’t with me tonight, but who else? Still no words, no voice. I feel unnerved. I must know. I am afraid yet still believe it must be someone who means me no harm. My bedside light won’t work; no house lights will. (Later I knew that the feeling of a man’s chest at my back was because of mother’s mastectomy. And so thin.)

I get up, rummage through the kitchen in the dark, and find matches and a stub of candle. The candle keeps guttering. All is real, not dreamlike: my house just as it is. Urgency, urgency. I think the person, slightly menacing (as Stephen can be), will come out of the bedroom to accost me. Yet of course I want to see and know.

I go out the front door for some reason. The locks are exactly as they are. When I come back to the kitchen, mother is standing there by the refrigerator, in front of the coffee pot, in a white linen gown. Her hair, ordinarily short and blond, is longish, graying, stringy. Her left eyelid is tired, something a bit wrong with it. (Gary had this at the end of his life: Horner’s syndrome.)

It is she. I can’t believe it, but it is she. Her expression! As though she knows all that is going through my mind. I feel everything that someone feels who sees a ghost, because a ghost isn’t dead, which is what she is telling me. I think she has never died and has only been away, had to disappear and now is back and will tell me why this happened, where she was. She looks immensely weary and says she must go soon: “I have come from such a long way.” I keep foolishly asking, “Do you know how shocked I am? What I’m having to comprehend? That you’re not dead and never have been?” But I am so happy, so undeservedly overjoyed at this gift: to have her again, not to have lost her. It almost can’t be true. 1997

When I wake in my bed and realize it is beyond a dream, I also feel unworthy, worthless. To have had this gift and not to know what to do with it! To have had this other world come to me, and I couldn’t even take it in. I don’t mean solely, selfishly that I did not ask for the answers to what I should do in my puny, stupid life—though I did want those, being puny and stupid. I mean that I did not seize real communication from another realm. At least I know it is there, and after all, that is what I’ve been asking for. Then opening the front door returns to me. Why that detail? I get out of bed and go outside, to find the moon. My house faces east. The rising moon is clearly visible in front of me, slightly waning, like her. I had opened the door to let her in.