The Dream of Living Underwater

I’ve noticed that they always wake you up from a deep sleep to tell you that someone is dead. Who are ‘they’? Who cares? Here’s what counts: someone is dead. Nobody cares who brought the message, only that the message of death was spoken and for some reason it couldn’t wait until I was awake and lucid.

There are several reasons why this practice is not optimal: After the death of an important someone, not important like John F Kennedy Jr or Lady Di, important like your mother or your brother, sleep becomes a problem. After death, sleep is either an elicit lover taken with furious and frequent passion to obliterate the pain of reality or it is a guerrilla entity who whisper walks through the jungles of your mind, carefully eluding you with olive and black painted face.

Either way, and any of the million variations in between, normal sleep patterns have ended. In the emotional turmoil that ensues, a well-rested body and brain might have been useful tools for everything from navigating the divvying up of the deceased’s valuables in a secret locked room, like Centurians over a cloak, to negotiating the emotional minefield of questions like, “Who did he love the most?”.

Knowing this, one would hope that the omniscient 'they' would stop and think,

“Let me give her one last night of good sleep. One more night where sleep is still just sleep and not a guilty addiction or a merciless tease.” Unfortunately 'they' aren’t omniscient and don’t even really have a clue what they are doing. After all, there isn’t a manual for giving death notifications, is there? Even if there were a manual, most often ‘they’ are partners in bereavement, having already received their own earth-shattering notification and consequently, have already taken leave of their senses. The manual got tossed out the window along with all the other good things like lucidity, sharp senses, happiness, sanity.

The worst part of having been wakened from a dream state to receive the news of death is that it becomes difficult to differentiate between the dream and the reality. I thought I’d never forget being shaken awake to the news that,

“Benjamin is dead.”

Nothing could, can, will ever be able to convey the sensations that accompanied those words. Even if you climbed inside my body at the point of revelation, I don’t think you could understand what I felt. I didn’t understand what I felt. I didn’t understand anything. Death is theoretical. Death is a plant without water on the windowsill. Death is a hypothetical- even for a half living field mouse caught in a trap and then released to hobble away because nobody had the strength to finish the job. Death is a grandmother who has had cancer for years. Death is not my baby brother who went to the hospital with a cough—a terrible, horrible cough, maybe pneumonia—but not death.

Death is a dream that you wake up from. This is what makes it so difficult to reconcile waking from a dream-state to receive news of death. What is to prevent me from believing that this news is simply the ugly beginning of the next dream in a series of dreams? What is to prevent me from, when I do go back to sleep, waking up to the reality that death was just a dream, a dreadful nightmare.

The matter complicates with the semi-somnambulance of mourning. How can I describe this? It is as if somebody is holding me underwater. I don’t feel the panic of being drowned, so this is no pool horseplay, a head held underwater until breathless terror sets in. This feels more like somebody has decided it is time for me to take up abode under the sea in a not-so-fun version of Spongebob Squarepants’ friend Sandy Cheeks the Texan Squirrel’s existence. Unlike Sandy, I don’t have a naturally sunny disposition and I have no deep sea diving suit.

Even though I lack an oxygen tank I’m somehow still breathing...barely. The someone who has relegated me to underwater living has fixed it so that my lungs, like gills, are now able to filter oxygen out of the water. But my lungs are so new to this job that breathing has become an onerous task—labored, exhausting. I also have not been outfitted with any sort of face mask to protect my eyes. Everything is a shapeless blur of muted colors, mostly drab and grey. It is difficult and painful but I am able to keep my eyes open in the unblinking burning of my new existence. Every so often I think I can let out all my air, let my muscles go loose and try to float to the surface where my real life used to be located. But something is holding me down— a terrible weight has me anchored to my new home.

Living underwater is a lonely place. All my old friends can’t really visit me. They try but they don’t know how to breathe underwater. They can only dart in for a quick visit and hurry back to the oxygen rich surface, gasping for breath when they finally escape my oppressive new world. They look at me helplessly from the surface, wringing their hands, wishing there was something they could do. The only people who can really visit me in my new underwater home are those who have already practiced living there in the echo of some loved one’s death. Though few and far between, these visitors are crucial to survival in a new environment. Without overt instruction, they teach me tricks: ways to exercise my lungs as gills, ways to alleviate the raw burning of water against the eyeballs, ways to find weightlessness in a world of constant pressure.

While living in this new environment I start to learn a completely different language. I learn to interpret baked ziti and sausage and peppers as declarations of loyalty and love. I learn to translate ridiculous statements like “It must be easier to lose one when you have so many brothers and sisters,” into palatable expressions like, “I am so sorry but I am terrified and panicked. I want to say the right thing but stupid stuff keeps gushing out of my mouth. I love you and I’m here for you.” I learn to hear, in somebody’s rendition of a Sound of Music countermelody, “You are not alone.” It is a language I never knew about before my brother died. It is a language I would never have chosen to learn. It is a language that enriched my life in unimaginable ways and now I can’t remember life without it.

Time passed underwater and eventually I got the hang of it. My lungs really learned the knack of efficiently filtering air. My eyes must have developed some glassy cataract because I started to see things more clearly in sharp, brightly colored relief. My muscles must have grown attuned to compensating against the constantly crushing pressure because life stopped feeling so heavy. I even began to like my new life. I met and married someone. I had children. I suddenly realized that I no longer wanted to wake up from the dream of my brother’s death. I didn’t want to float back to the surface of my other real life. This was my new real life. My realization might have felt like betrayal except I couldn’t really remember that other life anymore. It had become the shadowlands, so how could I betray what was only once a dream itself?

One night in my new life, I had the most horribly realistic dream. Inside this dream my son accidentally killed my daughter. The shadowy grayness descended immediately and I could not fathom how to survive that reality—one that was so palpable, it had to be true. I wept with empty sorrow, muffled and cold, until my own tears woke me up. Even when I woke up I could not get rid of the ache of loss. As I ran my fingers across each member of my perfectly intact family for reassurance, the hollowness just wouldn’t let go its nagging, wouldn’t let me believe that the dream had only been a dream. It reminded me of the early days after Ben’s death when I was sure, every morning, that I would wake up back into the reality where my baby brother was still alive. Right then, I knew I had abandoned his memory for my new one. I no longer missed his delicate touch and his soft breathy kisses. I knew that if I had to trade my new life with my husband and children to regain the reality in which Benjamin was still alive, I wouldn’t make the trade. I cried bitterly at that knowledge. By mid-day the bitterness of this truth had lost its poignancy, worn down by the rush of every day life. But isn’t that how it goes when a dream is just a dream?

Ten years had gone by since Ben died and my phone rang again at two AM. In the dark, my husband turned to me with the second saddest voice I’ve ever heard and told me, “Honey, it’s your dad...your mom is dead.” Right then, more than anything, I wished I could unring that telephone bell. I wanted to undue the truth. I wanted to quickly go back to sleep and re-enter the reality where my mom was still alive. You’d think I would have believed in the power of death but I had forgotten about its merciless swiftness. There I was again, the legs of my existence swept out from beneath me. This can’t be true. Not my mother, she’s only 58. No she’s 59 today. My mother can’t be dead, not on her birthday. Not on any day.

And then I was underwater again. Deeper? In a Mid-atlantic trench? Not really, the underwater sensation was very similar to the first time around: the bleak numbness, the confusion, the weight, the labored breathing, the sore eyes, the inability to focus. It was all so familiar and still, I wasn’t ready for it. How could I feel this way anew when I had grown so accustomed to living underwater over the years? I don’t know. Clearly my extended metaphor has severe limitations. It didn’t account for a second go round. To be honest, I thought I had already paid my dues to death, that it was somebody else’s turn to receive a notification for the next few decades. What a silly thought. Even the Flaming Lips realize that, “Everyone you know, someday, will die.” I just didn’t realize it.

Here’s the thing about having lived underwater before: I was already adept at navigating some of the treacherous pathways of this murky place. I had learned to avoid the darkest caves where the eight armed monster Self-Pity lurks. I knew not to chum the waters where the twin hammerhead sharks of Depression and Despair swim constantly. I had learned from the Mermaids that personal hygiene is an important ritual to maintain sanity, keep me from turning into ugly Ursula the Sea Witch. So many tiny tricks gleaned from my other season underwater, I was almost grateful for the first experience. Almost.

Ten years have almost passed since I began my second stint underwater. I’ve come to a place of stasis where the underwater living equals regular living. Having survived and reached equilibrium, I sometimes wonder, “What is it all about?” True, the survival has brought profound growth and, with that, love and still, I know there’s something more. A thought occurs to me: Isn't this existence merely an underwater dream compared to the glory of the next? And how does that seeming non sequitur make any sense of all of this? Since when does anything make sense? None of the dying, the confusion, the inability to breathe, the burning eyes have made any sense to me. Death brings license to freely explore the afterlife, to look straight into the "and then what" that comes after death. So maybe my thought is wishful thinking, or an hallucination brought on by oxygen deprivation, maybe even the result of the bends....perhaps, once upon a time, I made a break for my surface life too quickly. I offer any of these mitigators as a safety valve for the reader who is uncomfortable with the left turn my discussion has taken. As for me, I will accept my random purple thought as a gift and consider it a sort of fringe benefit of the dream of living underwater.