I Dream of Angels

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I awoke in the dark. Tears plastered my face. My body, from waist up, had shot up like a board. My breathing was heavy and rasped. I thought for a minute. My dream came back to me as they sometimes do for the fifteen minutes right after I wake up. I had been talking to my grandmother in my dream, but what made it strange was that she has been dead for a few weeks, and I was talking to her through an imaginary picture of her. I felt the picture with my fingertips by running them over the sheer, shiny paper.

I spoke. “You were sick long before ever mentioning anything, weren’t you?”

Her glossy doe-eyes looked sad, alone in her suffering, hunched shoulders and stiffened hands laid below her fallen crown. She was sick.

“Yes,” she admitted

I thought for a moment before asking another question.

“Why didn’t you tell us?”

She gave me a sympathetic look, “I thought it was better that way,” she sighed.

“Are you happier now?” I pressed.

Instead of answering, she smiled a small, childlike smile. She was no longer a part of the picture; instead, she stood above me almost tranced in a fog of light. Then she vanished. I wiped away the stream of tears running down my face. I was grieved, but felt as if closure was finally given to me. The past weeks I had felt guilty for avoiding her while she was sick. I just couldn’t stand to see her frail body slowly wither away without surrendering into a manic fit of bawling. The last week I saw her she didn’t know who I was any longer. She had left to a time period in her life that I was not apart of. She continually tried to escape the confines of her hospital bed to “get the boys on the bus”; all the while thinking she was still sending her sons (who were now my grown uncles) on a bus. It had left an empty place in my heart because I never truly said goodbye. I replaced the image of her from her hospital bed into the angel-like image of her from my dream into my mind and nodded off.

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