I had a dream.

Well, first of all, just having a dream is significant for me. I can count the number of dreams I have had since Michael died on one hand.

As with most dreams, there was no significant sense of time or place. In my dream I was returning home, which actually wasn’t my home. What was disturbing was that someone had stolen our bed. At first I thought maybe someone had borrowed it, and was perhaps using it as a prop for a play, but no, it was really stolen. Why would someone steal our bed?

I went everywhere looking for our bed, and was getting more and more angry. Eventually I went back home to see if there were any clues, or to see if anything else was missing. When I arrived home I took a good look around. Everything seemed to be in it’s place. Then out of the corner of my eye I saw an empty space on the book shelf. Our wedding photo album was missing. This was personal. Someone was taking Michael away from me once again.

Could this be happening? I thought I had already suffered all the loss that was possible, yet here I was still feeling like I’m on the losing side of life once again.

Michael keeps disappearing.

With each day that passes I feel further and further away from Michael. Since I recently moved, most of his things are still in boxes. I guess you could say he’s been put away. With each month that passes I hear less and less from the people that knew him. Our bed has become my bed. What used to be a place where we expressed our love has now become a place where I feel most alone.

So it’s no wonder that I feel like someone has stolen our bed, as it hasn’t been ‘ours’ since September 2009. And with time I’m feeling less and less married. The life made evident in our wedding album is forever gone.

Last week’s Christmas celebration was memorialized through pictures taken with my iPhone. There are many photos of my kids and my parents. After many photos were taken someone pointed out that I wouldn’t be in any of them. I said, “oh, that’s okay. I wasn’t in any of them before Michael became a part of our family. It just goes hand in hand with being a single parent.”

I had four years of living the dream. Now my dreams serve to remind me of what has been taken away.