My mother died a year ago today, on the 29th of January, which is also my sister’s birthday. However this came to be, I cannot imagine why it did, but it is so. Seeing as it is not my birthday, I can easily say what a special day it is to share, of one soul leaving as did the other come in. Alas, it is not my birthday, so I can only imagine the complicated feelings that would come with such an occurrance. What a terrible thing to share. It’s absolute shit, let’s be honest, made even worse by the fact that my mother was, in fact, a narcissist to her core. She was a covert narcissist, as I’ve learned her type is called. She was never overtly controlling, overtly self-centered, overtly manipulative. No she was a strange sort of opposite character. She was always late – unable to understand how this might be hurtful to the child waiting for her. She was unable to connect to us as her self wasn’t shown value or connection growing up. She simply didn’t know what to do. She only understood her sadness, ignoring that of others, that which she often caused. She didn’t mean it, if you will, but she hurt us nonetheless. So, for her to die on my sister’s birthday could be read as her final narcissistic act, making the day about her, overshadowing my sister’s happy day. Now, I know she did not mean it. Wherever she is now, I know she is apologizing whole-heatedly, finally understanding, though perhaps too late. We just have to know, she didn’t mean it.

This is not what I came here for today, to tell this agonising detail but it is hard not to talk about it. I feel for my sister but I will never understand her experience of what this day means, to her. Even if Mom had died on any other day, I don’t think that two people experience the same grief, just as it is impossible for anyone to have the same relationship with two different people. When I think about the journey of the relationship I had with my mom, well, there is just so much to think about. It was a long journey, with twists and turns, stops and restarts. It was complicated, to say the least. I am so grateful that we got to spend good times together towards the end of her life. I am even grateful for knowing that she would die and being able to prepare for it. There is so much that we missed out on, though. There are so many conversations that I would liked to have had with her. We just didn’t have the time.

Lately I have thought about missing her and wanting to see her. She would often be alive in my dreams, but not present, not actually in them. I would just be in the world knowing that she was alive and close by. I’d be in San Francisco, Oakland, or Berkley, mixing up landscapes that I’ve stored in my memories. All these images about being home or feeling at home, so many different places, times, and images all mixed up. I find myself confused in these dreams, when something will tip me off that maybe I am dreaming, some sign or signal, or some strange perspective. Often times I am racing to get somewhere, late for something., unable to get where I need to be. I might be in London, St. Louis, or LA, New York. These places are always a melange of parts that I’ve stored in my head, little vignettes that I’ve stored, enchanted by their urban beauty.

I often dream of the house I grew up in. Lately it seems I dream of it almost every night. I am very comforted by these dreams. Sometimes my parents are alive in these dreams, sometimes they have passed, but always, when I go home, I can feel them there, regardless. So when I wake, it is always painful to realise that I cannot go back there, I am here, in France, and that home is no longer ours. It may not even exist. It may have been destroyed to build a bigger, better house in its place. So when I awake, I have to grieve that feeling each time, that feeling of comfort, of continuity, of home. These dreams feel so real that when I wake up I have this transition time when I come into reality where I feel that all is lost. I have no home – the old home is gone and I am completely alone. I have to fight my way back to a conscious reality, one where I do have a home, a family, a place where I belong. It is not an enjoyable process but one that I know I must go through. I also know that it is not yet over, I have not yet finished this work. On the contrary, I seem to just now be entering a new era of this dream work.

I just realised, very recently, that my mother is not usually present in these dreams and that my father never is. I think this stirred something in me, in the spirits, as in just the last week or so they have both appeared. A few days ago, I openly wept in my dream, begging the death of my mother to not be true, she can’t go, no, no, no… I cried, and wept lying on the ground, curled up into myself. When I woke up I realised that I mourned for here there in a way I haven’t been able to in the waking world, in a way that felt almost to vulnerable to bear. She was in another dream, too, present and happy. I am not sure what she said or did but I felt her love. I was happy that I was able to see her there. Just today I dreamt that my father was beginning a full-scale construction project on our home property and I was trying to talk him out of it, or at least slow things down to make sure he’d thought it through. Another night I dreamt that the shed, the building just across the drive from the house, had been finished into a lovely workshop that we shared. Another night, I dreamt of a built-in bench along the wall by the wood-burning stove in our home, which we’d worked on together in the dream. It was a lovely addition to the room, with cushions made to fit. In all, it made the room even more cosy and homey. To wake from these dreams – of contentment, of living parents, of home – and to have to come to terms, again and again, that actually they are not living and there is no more home – is this grief? Is this grieving? Is this my mind’s way of working through this all to make me finally accept that they are all actually gone? What a horrible, torturous process this is. I remember this well from when my Grandmother died. I would dream of being in her house, of being with her, of being in a world in which she was still alive. Every time I would wake up and realise that it was a dream I would lose her all over again. Sometimes I would cry, sometimes I would simply ache, sometimes I would cry out a guttural scream like a wounded animal, and sometimes the scream would be silent.

All of this is part of this grief, this horrible grief. I want it to go. I want it to be over. I want them to be with me and I want them to let me live. I need to make my own home now, with my own family. I don’t know how I will ever replace these childhood homes, of my family and of my grandmother. I hope that I can at least add one, the home of my adulthood. I need to feel permanence; it has been too long. I have lived too many places, and none of them have been mine. I will inherit my mother’s home along with my sister, but we will probably not keep it forever as it is too sad. It was never our home but it was the one we made for her at the end of her life, to give her the happy ending that she so deeply deserved. Is that also happy for us? I am not sure but from where I stand now, I do not think so. I think we will keep it for awhile until we know that we will be ok, and then I think we will let it go. So I must buy a house of my own, for my self and my family, to belong once more. Maybe then the dreams will be happy, maybe I can welcome them all there too, these spirits of my family, to my new home. I need the grief to someday soon, I hope, to someday soon turn into an acceptance deep inside of me so that when I see them I can know that they are gone from the waking world, but that I can see them in my dreams, and it won’t have to be sad when I do, just more like a homecoming, for all of us.