Becoming Oliver

When you find yourself a widower one of the things that you realize eventually is that if you are going to proceed in life in functional manner your going to have to figure out who you are as a individual. No longer are you Bruce the Husband of Francie. Eventually as you go about your life you recognize that who you were and what you were about no longer are a functioning paradigm in the living world as you go about your day.

Nothing fits…… you might find yourself just stalled out after so long no longer knowing what you should do. What you would like to do, who you would like to be, It’s almost as if your out of phase with life because all the things that you spent a lifetime habituating yourself to. Out of love for another or necessity have no claim or are available to you.

And that is when i began to understand how it is that people came to believe in ghost.
Her life, her passion, her storms were all still present and tangible in this dimension I remain in.
What the hell do you do with that? Do you spin it into some neurological trick of your mind. Or do you validate it as something as a real metaphysical event where she somehow slipped the bonds of death and came to visit me. Even if for no other reason than to read me the riot act.

In the end I decided it was real it was her ghost coming to me in my dreams if for no other reason than to let me know I wasn’t alone.

Several weeks later in another lucid dream I found myself with her in our kitchen and we’re making dinner together. It was exactly like when we were younger and she was strong and had the energy to enjoy the good things……
I was slicing a piece of beef and she was making biscuits. We were talking about my previous dream where she was railing about what I did with her stuff.
As I’m telling her about how dream went. Shes laughing at the whole thing, about how she was raising hell and how I’m just bowled over and bewildered.
We laughed and laughed, bumping hips. I can smell her hair it lasted an eternity, lt lasted long enough.
It was perfect, we both knew that the first dream was exactly how she would have acted. And we are just laughing at the absurdity of the whole thing because it was real in this upside down world we were in.

My last lucid dream was in the morning as well and we were together again, this time in bed together.
It was morning and I’ve woken to realize she is back again, with me, I can feel her warmth. Smell her scent, her hair is tickling my face. I can feel how our body’s are molded together. I can feel her small feet shifting around my feet trying to steal some heat from mine, saying hello.
As I’m leaving my subconscious and waking to realize she returned to visit me one more time. I begin to run my hand across her arms her thigh. Abruptly again I am an awake and she gone. I repeat this sleep wake process a couple of times. Each time waking to realize that I can’t have her in this world again.

But I can still smell her and feel the warmth of where she was next to me in bed.

So yes i believe in ghost. Are they simply a construction of my subconscious playing with my conscious mind. I don’t know and honestly don’t really care. The impact of these encounters gave me the freedom to relish what we were. The fire, the joyful abandon of naked honesty, and the passion, the playfulness.

That these things are impressions on my soul, they are real and they will never die. They are eternal and still exist in time and space. Also it was her telling me. That is was ok, that she knows for now I am alone in life and that I will now need to remake myself into a new person who is not defined as Bruce the husband of Francie.

and that’s ok…… it is as it should be

So I have chosen to go by what has always been my first name. The name of my Great Grandfather.
Oliver