I saw my mom the night she passed. The hospital froze my mom in an attempt to preserve her brain function after her likely stroke. Eventually they have to warm her back up to see if she stabilized. Unfortunately, she didn’t.
In my dream, it’s a beautiful sunny day and I am walking up to a pedestrian bridge behind Wayne State University to walk over the highway to the other side. I was with my two oldest friends and we were laughing and smiling as we walked up to the bridge. I see my mom standing at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the bridge. She was scared, lost, and confused. She kept looking around at something that I couldn’t see and I could tell it scared her. She didn’t recognize me at first. I walked right up to her and asked why she didn’t tell me she was there. She calmed down a bit when she heard my voice but she never spoke to me. I grabbed her and gave her a huge hug and said I loved her and my friends and I continued across the bridge without her.
When I woke up from the dream, I received a notification from the hospital that she passed. Also, fuck Beaumont. They wouldn’t let us stay with her overnight because of COVID and said they only let people stay if the situation is dire. What’s more dire than on the brink of death? Again, fuck Beaumont. I will say, some of the nurses were the sweetest people and it means a lot in a situation like this. But COVID policies were bullshit.
The second dream came about three weeks after she passed I would cry myself to sleep and beg Allah to take me to my mom. It wasn’t until this dream did I realize what I was truly asking for. Cut to the dream, I just arrived in the middle of a very busy metro station. I have no idea how I got there or why I was there. It was like I was dropped in the middle of rush hour rat race and it was disorienting. As I am trying to figure out where I am I notice a familiar face. It’s my grandma. She passed in 2007 and she was my mom’s mom. She was the purest soul. I am immediately comforted! She smiles and motions for me to come to her and she points to a slightly ajar door. I couldn’t see what was behind the door because it was dark. But my heart tells me my mom is there. As I start my walk towards my grandma a giant stream of people cut us off blocking my path to her. I keep walking and trying to navigate but there never seems to be a moment for me to cross. I look up to my grandma to give her a ‘I’m tryin here” face and her smile is gone. She lowers her head slight but never breaks eye contact and a sneer grows across her face. This was not the grandma I knew. I start to get the sense that maybe that person isn’t my grandma. As the realization hits me my ‘grandma’ walks away and enters the dark room and I wake up. Begging to be with my mom was basically asking for Allah to let me die. I don’t think I’ve processed that dream and it’s been nearly a year.
The last dream I had about her was a bittersweet one. I was sitting on the floor of my living room with my head leaned on the arm of one of my couches. I was watching the best of Shahrukh Khan and I was in the Devdas era of his career. Dola Re Dola comes on and I hear my mom singing. I look up and I am suddenly resting my head on her lap. She is laughing and singing and doing her little shoulder bounce and clap dance. She looks so beautiful and also so lame dancing like that. I feel joyful and then embarrassed at her lack of rhythm and then pure sadness. When she sees the emotional journey on my face she touches my cheeks and sweetly smiles at me and tells me to dance with her. I start sobbing and beg her to stay. As soon as my tears fall, its like something pulls her back and she says she has to go and make me food. I keep begging her not to leave me and I wake up sobbing. I have never woken up from a dream in tears. This is another one I have not processed.
I don’t know. Maybe it’s the Bengali in me but I believe it’s my mom coming to visit me. As time builds between when my mom was here and not, she visits me less. I love that I see her in my dreams but it kills me that even in my dreams the pain of losing her is so strong that I can’t even pretend she is still here.