I had a dream about Mom last night. A very odd dream, very weird, and one I wish were fact. I actually woke up, realized it had been a dream and tried to go back to sleep to recapture it.

In the dream, Mark’s family and my family were all gathered at my house in Yankton, though it wasn’t exactly my house. There was a porch on it and an old screen door on the front. My dad came into the house and told us he had a surprise for us. Mom walked through the door, backed by all the light from outside the house. She looked thinner than she was before she’d gotten sick, but not as gaunt as she became in those last weeks. Her smile in the dream was just beaming. She told us that she’d not died after all, that there was an experimental chemotherapy which had put her into a deep coma. When the doctors woke her up, she was scanned and had blood drawn and was found to be completely and totally cancer free! We were all bawling and hugging. I told her that I’d seen her cremated remains. She laughed at that, saying she’d seen them as well, that it wasn’t really her at all.

I’m not huge into dream interpretation as a therapist, possibly because I don’t often recall what I dream. What I have recalled since Mom died is mostly dreams about my father. I know that I’ve been very worried about him.

Anyway, I thought about the dream while I was getting ready for work. Tomorrow will be a month since Mom died. Some days it seems like a lot longer than that, other days a lot shorter. I think the dream was a couple of things. First, the fantasy of a boy who misses his mom. I want her back SO much, but only on my terms (see how the world should work?), which is to say cancer free, healthy and happy. The second thing I thought of was maybe this was Mom’s way of letting me know that she is okay. That she no longer has the cancer, that she’s no longer hurting and the body she left behind really wasn’t her, it was just the cocoon that she left behind when she was transformed.

This was the first dream I’ve had of Mom since her death. In a lot of ways, I’m grateful that I could recall the dream because I know Amy has had several dreams about Mom and I’d not had any. Had me thinking something wasn’t quite right with me and how I was going about grieving the loss.