I’ve had bad dreams. From the giant sock monster that swallowed me in my childhood basement, it’s green stomach acid bubbling around me – to the sleep paralysis induced hallucinations of a cloaked figure being beheaded at the foot of my bed, the lifeless body then falling on top of me. You wake up from these dreams and find relief in the fact that they aren’t real. What about the dreams where the nightmare starts when you wake up, because it is the reality?
My dad has been battling pancreatic cancer for four years. Recently the treatment options have been limited to clinical trials and hoping for a miracle. My dad has been away for a little while. I haven’t heard from him, and no one really talks about him or where he is. One day I come home from school and I hear his voice. I drop my backpack and run into the kitchen. He is there with my mom. He smiles and opens his arms for a hug. I hug him so tightly and he says with a light-hearted chuckle, “Oh, Monkey”. He explains he had to go away for a clinical trial and that nobody could know because the study was controversial. But it worked – he was cancer free. His hair was full and dark, fat filled his once baggy skin, and the IV port in his neck was gone. No more pill tracking, no more sleep filled days and sick nights. Screw the oxygen tanks and Depends. And then I wake up.
I walk past my dad’s room and down the stairs – the house I grew up in, my parent’s forever home, that my mom has to sell because she can't afford it on her own. My dad died over a year ago, taken away by an ambulance in the middle of the night. I never saw his body leave the house, but when I woke up I knew he was gone. I said goodbye to him that evening, or at least I tried. He had so much morphine in his system he couldn’t hold my hand. I managed to get out an I love you. I wanted to tell him that it was okay that he was dying. He knew what it was like to lose a dad at a young age and he didn’t want to do that to me, but I didn’t want him to be in pain anymore. I wanted to say thanks for teaching me how to make the best grilled cheese and when to flip a pancake. For showing me how to do laundry and my taxes. For sneaking me peanut butter jelly sandwiches when mom sent me to bed without dinner. For bringing me soup, with crackers and grated cheese on the side, along with a fruit salad he tossed and a chocolate milkshake he hand stirred when I was sick and confined to my room. For the files he recovered of papers I wrote without saving. For rarely overreacting when teaching me how to drive. For all the things that made me a daddy’s girl.
I had that dream, always the same, a few times. Every time I woke up. And every time his ashes were still buried at Mount Calvary Cemetery in St. Albans.