I woke up last night to the overwhelming sense that Ali was lying next to me.  It was as though our heads were both tilted toward the center and touching.  Nothing else, just silently laying next to one another looking up at the ceiling. The experience lasted three or four minutes and then disappeared.

I even had a very clear sense of her expression...not smiling, but, the corners of her mouth turned up slightly...the way you look when you are content.  As I wrote this last sentence, chills went up my spine, because I realized that the experience felt exactly as it did the night we snuck out at 2 a.m. with two glasses of wine and a blanket and laid quietly on top of the Navigator watching a meteor shower. 

I have dreamed her before, but not very often.  Sometimes she pops up in dreams that are like every other dream and then there are those in which she seems to be standing in front of me and our conversation is in real time.  There is a distinct difference in the colors, the texture, and the clarity of what is going on.  They never last more than a few seconds and then she is gone.  I had a similar thing happen a few months after my dad died.  It was how I was finally able to properly say good-bye.

In the last dream of Ali, she looked a little older and there was a maturity about her. Her hair was the length that it was before the cancer.  She was vibrant and greeted each of us as if she had just gotten off of the subway in New York in winter…rushed and happy.

The day after she died, I was in bed resting-- on the cusp between being asleep and awake when I heard her voice very clearly as if she were in the room. It startled me and I lay there with my eyes wide open and my heart pounding. Ali was a terrible driver and in addition, always seemed to get lost.  Because of that, she generally called when she got somewhere safely. I tell you this, because when I heard her voice, it was like she was leaving a message on the answering machine.  “Hi mom, it’s me, just wanted you to know that I’m here and I’m safe…so, ok…I love you.”  

Nothing like that has ever happened again…until last night.  If it were up to me, I would invite her into my dreams every night, but that isn’t the way it works. Life and death each carry their own mystery and much like meteors shooting from their corner of the world into ours, I have come to believe that every once in a while, God allows his worlds to converge.  

To die... To sleep... no more...

And by a sleep to say we end the heartache,
and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to..
.
Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished!   


To die...   To sleep... 
To sleep?  Perchance to dream! 

Ay there's the rub!  
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause...

--Shakespeare’s Hamlet