This past week, I had a pretty crazy dream. It’s the first time of this sort that I have ever had. As many of you know, our Tuesday writer, Mike, is my boyfriend. He lost his wife, Megan, in 2014 to Cystic Fibrosis and I lost my fiance, Drew, in 2012 in a crash. We’ve been dating now a few years, and still nothing like this dream has showed up before.

And then came Mother’s Day last week… and the post I wrote about Mike and Megan’s daughter, whom I am now caring for as my own. You can read that post here, but essentially it boiled down to my deep appreciation for this little person being in my life now and all that she has changed for the better.

So that night, the end of Mother’s Day, I had a dream… about Megan…

It was not just any dream. It was one of *those* dreams… and you all know the ones I mean. The dreams that some of us call “visits” because of how realistic they feel. In this dream, Megan was in a hospital bed and Mike and I were on either side of her. He was not a major part of the dream, except to introduce me to Megan at the beginning. He told her that I was the new person in his life. That I was the one chosen to be here, after her. And then, there was this completely real, completely tangible moment of us looking eye to eye at one another. Silence. Hearts beating, a little tensely. Guardedness. Neither yet saying words… she was taking me in. She was taking in this moment of her life that she knew would always come.

And just as if it had been real, you could feel the presence of protectiveness in her. The seriousness of the situation in her. And she then looked forward a moment, took a breath, and began to tell me in a very matter of fact way what was important to her for me to take care of after she’s gone…

There was no beautiful blessing to this dream. I did not hear “Oh i’m so happy you’ll be here to care for my daughter and love my husband! You’re the perfect person!”. No blissful, fluffy, Hallmark movie feeling here. There was a guarded feeling instead. It was the sort of feeling that would have been there had we ever been presented with meeting in this light in real life….

It was quiet, and awkward, and difficult to swallow. There was a heaviness in the air around us, but also a sense of surrender. In that moment of silence between us, she was accepting the situation that she could not control… and then moving swiftly into what she could control – making sure I understood what was important, and what my job was as I stepped essentially, into her role. E.I. “Here are the things not to fuck up”. I was completely silent, in that moment knowing that my place was strictly to listen intently to everything she told me.

I woke up before there was anything specific said in that dream… but what I do remember was the overall message: her daughter. That was the one thing not to fuck up. It didn’t feel like a warning, as if I was doing anything wrong. It just felt like her needing to say it, directly to me, and make sure that I understood it, like REALLY understood it. It felt like she needed to face me, or that we needed to face each other, awkward as that was. Maybe for her to trust me? I still don’t know.

Given what I had just written that very day before… the timeliness of this dream was surreal.

The oddest part of it is that I never did meet this person in real life. I never heard her voice in person – though I have heard it in old family videos. I’ve never known her personality except for how it has been described to me by her family. Yet I believe 100% that the person who was looking at me and speaking to me was unequivocally Megan. In my mind at least, it was very much her.

Although I’m not entirely sure what to take away from this… it was very profound for me, and I’ve been thinking about it all week. I do recall that, as we sat together in the dream, the tension melted away. It began to feel less like some awkward standoff and more like we were a team… with trust being built. Had we had longer together, I’m sure we would have eventually gotten around to laughing at Mike for a myriad of his idiosyncrasies that drive us both nuts! I suppose that’s another dream for another day though. Like all things in this life after death, one bit at a time.