White Butterfly

In my dream Marty told me.  She touched my face with her hands, she leaned over, kissed my cheek and said, “Thank you for loving me.  I was right about all of this, don’t ever be afraid.”

About two weeks after Marty passed in 2019 I had a dream.  I normally don’t remember dreams, this one I did because I woke up and the memory stuck. 

I remember the dream today.

Like any memory I’ve had, I’ve probably managed to edit and emphasize the dream to meet my own ideas.  It’s what we do, we revise, we edit, we embellish, we make our memories fit into our preconceived ideas. 

The most important parts, the words, the gestures, the end, I remember.  Those parts feel real even today.

In this dream I’m pushing Marty’s wheelchair across a forest trail.  It’s a well-maintained path, one of those crushed granite paths that allows for easy wheelchair travel, about 4 feet wide with grass or dirt on either side.  I could hear the small pieces of the trail being crushed and breaking under the hard rubber tires of the wheelchair, a crunching sound. 

To the right is a small creek, rushing to its end, noisily running over earth, rocks, and vegetation as it seeks lower ground and a place to spill.  To the left were trees and bushes and flowers, all volunteer, growing at different rates to different heights with no rhyme nor reason for where they planted themselves.

We moved across the path in silence, listening to the water, listening to the ravens talking to the other ravens, listening to the wind blow through the trees on our left.  The leaves danced to the tune of the wind, the water moved relentlessly across a path dug eons ago, a place for the water to run to its master.

We hadn’t walked far when I saw a spot to move off the trail and sit and listen to the sounds of life around us.  I told Marty what I was going to do, she just nodded.  We pulled off to the side and I stared at the brook, the clear water slowly moving downhill. 

I’m not sure what it is about the sound of running water, I just know it gives comfort.  We stopped and listened and watched the birds fly, the clouds billow and the water continue to erode the ground as it rushed and tumbled down the hill. 

I looked at Marty and she stood from her wheelchair and faced me.  Blew my mind. This was not the sick, broken Marty, this was the Marty I met in 1974, the Marty with long brown straight hair parted in the middle.  This was the Marty in too short cut offs and a white cotton blouse that moved slowly in the wind.

Marty turned to me; the wheelchair that had transported her for 14 years was gone.  She stood for a couple of beats and looked at me, her blue eyes clear, sharp, and knowing.  She reached up to me, put one hand on each side of my cheek and said, “Thank you for loving me so well”, she kissed my lips gently and whispered in my ear, “I was right, it’s just like I said.”

I looked at her, looked up and she was gone.  I watched standing beside that stream in silence.  I saw a small white butterfly flying away, up and around a mountain juniper and down the trail without me. 

That was all.  Truthfully, I’m not sure how much of this is the exact dream and how much of it is my own brain creating what I want to remember.  I just don’t know. 

I’ve struggled a bit to write this.  In some ways it feels a bit, well, weird.  I’m not into weird supernatural stuff.  Well maybe not.

When I was hiking in Colorado this past June with friends I was walking down a forest trail and what did I see, a white butterfly.  I followed the butterfly up the trail a short distance and out into a small white meadow with a stream of snow melt running downhill.  It was like my dream, and I left a little of
Marty in Rocky Mountain National Park. 

I told my kids and their kids this story and now when the grands see a white butterfly they see their grandmother.  And you know what, a white butterfly has taken up residence at daughter Erin’s house. 

My grands will never see another white butterfly and not think of their grandmother. 

It’s a good story and as far as I know, the dead level truth.

Grief

 

Time passes.  It gets better.  But every now and then I can still feel grief sneak up behind me and grab me by the neck and shake me a little bit.  I’m always surprised.

There are five very distinct steps in processing grief (some say 7….who needs that?).  I’ve done the five steps, heck, I’ve even done the seven steps of grief.  Denial, done it; anger, oh yeah, felt it; bargaining, me and God, we talked a lot; depression, yeah, got the t-shirt, it’s real; and finally, acceptance, which is sort of a moving target.

What nobody ever bothered to tell me is you occasionally have do-overs with the whole grief thing.  Hey moron, start at step one and do it again.  I feel myself going through all the steps when the grief monster manages to grab me and attempts to swallow me whole.

For me as the chief cook and caregiver, for my kids, Erin and Matt, we started the whole grieving process on April 4, 2005, after Marty’s first stroke.  We lost so much of Marty after the first stroke and even more eight months later after the 2^nd stroke. 

The brain damage from the strokes robbed us of who Marty had been, the strokes killed off too much of her.  Of course, we mourned, of course we walked the steps of grief.

Long term caring gives you a lot of time to work through the loss and grief, it also gives you a lot of time to grieve, to feel the grief, to see the brokenness of your cared for every day.  You get an up close real look at denial and anger and depression almost daily.  The cycle of mourning became a daily struggle, and she was still with us.

When Marty had her first stroke, a cerebral aneurysm, I lived in a state of denial for a long time.  Really, the denial kind of kept me from going crazy.  I would have cratered had I known what really lay in store for us. 

I did the anger thing on a regular basis, sometimes anger at others, often anger at myself for not doing enough.  I bargained and I know I went through bouts of depressions where everything felt so dark and sad and bitter it was hard to rejoice in the sunshine that occasionally graced us. 

When I finally got to the acceptance part, where I realized where we were and how our life must continue in our new normal, life got better.  Those other feelings were there, grief over the loss of what was, but eventually I came to understand this was our life and we needed to live it the best way we could.

The sadness, the feelings of loss become a part of your essence.  They become a part of you, but never your whole, just a part of whole that makes you unique.  As time goes on, as you work your way through the important parts of grieving, it doesn’t go away, it settles in to be a critical part of who you are and your journey. 

Hopefully, that permanent part of grief that becomes part of your DNA is not a feeling that defines you or rules your brain.  In my journey, it hasn’t gone away, it is simply diminished, it is part of my background like my deep west Texas accent.

I still think of Marty every day, some days that makes me sad, some days that makes me smile, most days I smile, but the loss, the loss that started all the way back in 2005 is still there, and on the whole, I can live with that.