Notes From the Void: Life, Death, Nightmares and Haley’s Comet, Part 2; or Chaos and Dreamscapes, Life Finds a Way…

 

I remember one day my mother, seemingly out of nowhere, said:  

                    “I dreamed in color last night.” 

                    “Wait, you don’t usually?”

                    “No.”

                    “What do you dream in?”

                    “Black and white.”

There was that Pearl Jam song too, “She dreams in color, she dreams in red.” It had always seemed so weird to me. I dream in color—doesn’t everyone? I never considered the possibility that people might dream in black and white. I’ve tried to find out more about this experience—I should look harder. I think it has to do with each generation’s access to media—when my mother was young, the new broadcasts were in black and white. The written page was black and white, television was in black and white—even after the colorization of movies, they usually used some hazy black and white image to portray the old times. So I guess it makes sense that under those circumstances, the mind might process information in black and white.

Maybe dreaming in black and white also meant it was easier to see that you were in a dream. Your mind knows that it is just cataloguing data, or trying to figure something out, not experiencing something fresh. But in color—all bets are off. Your mind has to do things to remind you that you are in dreamscape. Maybe that’s why if we wake up from a dream where we are working a full day and find out we actually hadn’t worked the day, just dreamed it—we’re so tired …Maybe that’s why I never dream about the people or places I want to—even in my dreams I never seem to get what I want…

But I’ve also felt that the processing of information was an important part of dreams and why would my brain waste valuable time in sleep thinking about someone I think about all day while I’m awake? I already know what my feelings are about that person, and if they are in my dreams too, well my focus is on them and getting what I want out of whatever situationship might be going on. if my brain uses someone else in dreamscape, I might actually see the dream for what it is—my brain desperately trying to make me aware of something.

I remember one recurring dream I used to have a lot was running—I was running away from something, but I wasn’t—my feet were just enough off the ground, or the ground was so soft it was almost as air. No matter how I tried to push myself faster, I wasn’t getting anywhere. That one kind of speaks for itself.

There was a dream I had around the time I started watching Supernatural—which was also that crazy year 2008 when we were in a bad recession and I was knocked to part time.  I watched a lot of horror and old Dr. Who that year—like 4th Doctor old…anyway, I had a dream where Jeffrey Dean Morgan and I were in bed together.  Relax, this dream wasn’t that exciting. He was asleep. I wasn’t and I was just staring at him in bed, this pang came over me and I realized I really loved this man. And then he rolled over onto me—he was still asleep, by the way—his full 6’1” frame dead weight on top of me, suffocating me. I woke up from that dream gasping for air. That’s when I realized that it didn’t matter who the guy was, how hot he was, I was not ready for a relationship—I felt completely and totally suffocated by the very idea of it. See what I mean though?  How could I have seen that if I was obsessively in love with the guy that was in the dream with me?  Since I didn’t have a crush on JDM, just was like yeah, he’s a damn fine looking man and just went about my business, I could see the dream for what it was—a message that things weren’t working out because I didn’t want them to. I had other things to focus on, other goals that had to do with me doing stuff for me—not me doing stuff for some guy and being something for some guy.  But if it had been Jensen Ackles, I might have once again gone on about my brain sabotaging me—that I couldn’t ever get what I want in my dreams.  Oh wait, I just did say that. Moving along…

I had this one dream when I was thirteen, where my Noni visited me. She had passed away not long before. I remember coming to the screen door at the side of the house—we still lived in Easthampton at the time. She didn’t even come up the stairs, but was just in the driveway—I remember her being uncharacteristically fidgety, like she had somewhere to be. Before I could even say anything, she said that she couldn’t stay, but she just wanted to let me know that she was ok. And then she was gone. 

Both sets of my grandparents are gone now, but I never had anything like that happen with any of the others.  It never happened with Noni again.  Well, I shouldn’t say never—“since” is a better word. Truthfully I’m not sure why it happened when it did.  Maybe it was because of the guilt I felt over that summer when Non was so sick and dying I was at summer school taking classes on computer programming, theater and tennis. Maybe it was because of how Non’s death effected my mother. And was it my brain processing shit, or was it really Non, speaking to me briefly before heading off to the undiscovered country? It’s not like Noni and I had any conversations about my fear of death. I’ve always played my feelings as close to the chest as possible. Yeah I know—there are walls. I’m working on them, really I am.

And really that is why the long introduction to Part 2 of this essay, and note how long it has taken me to get to the part where I am letting my guard down a bit…

My Noni passed in 1989—but her serious health concerns started two years before. She was 62 years old, retired. I remember her doing a lot of sitting at the kitchen table with her pack of cigarettes. We saw Noni and Grandpa every weekend, but Grandpa was always gruff and usually not present—even when he was there—when Noni was alive. I remember that Noni would go to Atlantic City for a few days with friends from time to time. She loved gambling. She was really something else. I remember when she out of the blue told me and Mom about how she loved to tap dance as a girl and actually did a few steps.Tapping was what I was best at of the competitive dancing I did. Sadly, it was before Riverdance took off, so not many people seemed to care at the time about great tapping…Anyway, Non health issues started with an attack where she couldn’t breathe, needed to be hospitalized, and was diagnosed with emphysema. She had been a two pack a day since 16 type of gal, but she quit cold turkey when this happened. She saw it as a wake up call, and time to change her life.  But the damage was already done and within two years she had lung cancer. There wasn’t much treatment they could offer due to her severely compromised lungs.

I thought about this a lot when Dad had to have a lobe of his lung removed back a few years ago. All these years later, the baseline preventative treatment for smokers 65+ is an annual CT scan to check the lungs. During one of these routine checks something was found—and Dad was good for a couple years after that, before he started having problems again and finally went in to find out the lung cancer was back with a vengeance. He seems to be doing very well now, a testament to modern experimental medicine.

But the thing to note is that my Non is my Mom’s mom, not my Dad’s mom. And I think that often we see our own longevity and gauge our own time on this earth often by our parents, our grandparents—how long they were given. Maybe not taking into consideration different environmental factors, work factors, or the life factors. We feel like maybe if mom lived to a certain age, we’d at least get that, right? I mean this is America! The idea is for the next generation to do BETTER than the generation before. Surely that means out-live them, too? Maybe we don’t see it coming—maybe we think we have more time, because like a friend I used to work with said—when your parents go, there’s the startling realization that you’re next….

I mentioned before that I’ve always had that unhealthy fear bordering on obsession with death—and if I’m honest with myself—this is probably a reason why I don’t get incredibly close to too many people. No, not because I’m Wednesday Addams—but because of that fear of loss. My brother got mad at me about this once saying something along the lines of who the hell are you to think you’re going to be the one to live forever? I really don’t.

I suppose I’m more of a typical Catholic in that capacity—I didn’t think we were supposed to be all that big on making plans far off—I mean who are we to believe that we’re going to be alive for those plans to come to fruition? And tie that in with good old Gen X fatalism? Suffice it to say the very idea of planning out a trip a year into the future has always felt presumptuous to me. Even the couple of times I went to England, I didn’t have fun talking about my planned trip before hand. Maybe I felt preparing for something in the future was a jinx on it. Maybe laughing at the fates. What is that joke—how do you make God laugh? Tell him your plans? This may also be why I’m poorly prepared for the long term—something I need to seriously work on…That whole live like you’re going to die tomorrow, learn like you’re going to live forever—well, I understood that. It’s the planning for the future part I need to get more into…

At a certain point in Dad’s illness Mom realized that the trip they had planned for New Mexico wasn’t going to happen. COVID was the reason for the first postponement, but in March of this year I went with Mom to see about canceling the trip entirely. As I was leaving the AAA office in West Springfield, going past the Olympia and turning onto Ashley Avenue, I saw an older man walking in the parking lot. He was shorter, portly, with glasses, bald—I had to do a double take. He looked just like Rog. I suppose of all the people I have known that have passed on from this life, the most likely to come back and haunt us all, especially with all I the shit that has been going on over the past few years, it would be Rog. And I couldn’t figure out why I would be thinking about Rog. Why in that moment. So I looked up his old Facebook account. March 24, 2019. It had been almost three years.

I got my first dose of The Suffield Players at Suffield on the Green.  They seemed cool, and I wanted to get in with another theater group, but I was very nervous to audition at a theater where I knew no one. I finally did decide to chance it and audition for Suffield’s winter play, A Year In the Death of Eddie Jester.  

Partly because my director self likes ensemble casting—seeing how the chemistry among the actors works, and casting for that something-something where there is a synergy we can feel with the group, and partly because I don’t want the director to forget about me when they are making their casting decisions, I often times try to attend both audition days.  This was one of those times.  

And these auditions are where I first met Rog. Roger was the director for the show and the second day he instantly noticed that I seemed much taller than I did the first day.  So I lifted the legs of my pants, to show off the platform heels I was wearing. Apparently Rog had a very fixed idea of what he wanted to happen in this play, and having a tiny blonde beat the crap out of a man that was over six feet tall was that thing.  He casted me in the role of Heather that night. I didn’t have to wait for a call. He told me before I left. It actually gave me a false sense of what future auditions with Suffield would be like—because since that audition in November of 2012, I have always had to wait for a call or an email offering me a part, or telling me I unfortunately wasn’t what they were looking for this time around. This wasn’t a huge part, in fact the way that Tom Argall wrote the script, Heather could actually be played by the same actor that played the other nurse, but Rog divided it up.  

When I think about Rog, I think of the table read for this show, where Rog asked me how much I worked out because my guns were great, and considered putting me in a tank top or muscle shirt instead of scrubs. But I also think about the short where I played a teenager and Rog asked if I had a Catholic schoolgirl outfit to wear and I asked him if Japanese Manga schoolgirl would work. He said yes, but was actually shocked just how short the skirt was…He was very careful to have the chair in front of me when I, in character, hugged the other actor on stage…even though I told him the short skirt also included matching shorts underneath, so nothing interesting would be seen.

Rog was both the most curmudgeonly person I have ever met, and probably the sweetest, too. I have been to two special tributes to him, but that day in West Springfield, “seeing” him is when I finally really cried. And sure people have said this kind of thing before, but that is when I felt it.  When I felt the loss. When I realized what had been missing at the playhouse for me. The shows where Rog was involved, you could spend quite a while after rehearsals or shows talking to him right outside the main door, or sometimes the kitchen door. He was usually smoking. And he told such stories about shows he had been involved in—a show he directed a few years before, or a show he was in twenty, thirty years ago.

And this year, the writer of that show, Tom Argall, left us too. I remember when I first met Tom—I was so scared to have THE PLAYWRIGHT in the audience. He and his wife came from Ottawa and they were wearing t-shirts that said Ego Trip 2013—They were going from playhouse to playhouse watching Tom’s shows be put on. After the show he answered questions, and then partied with us in the kitchen of Mapleton Hall. Tom asked if I could be the souvenir he brought back home with him to which Margaret said, “she’ll fit in the trunk.” After the show, Tom stayed in contact with us, and when he did a web comic and printed graphic novel, he used some of us. I wrote the forward for the second volume graphic novel. He was so supportive of my writing, too. He is one of the few people who has read my passion project, The Legend of Ophelia Vale. When he had his second heart attack, I set up a Zoom meeting for some of us to talk to him. I had no idea how sick he was, no idea that would be the last time I would be able to talk to him, get his advice, find out about his newest projects. And you know, in moments like those, at least for me, I always worry that I wasn’t a good enough friend. That I should have taken more time out of being in my own head to be present, listening, finding out what is important to the others in my life. 

We really don’t have long here on this earth, and the older I get the more I realize that. This brings to mind one of Mulder’s lines in the season three episode Quagmire:

I think nature is supremely indifferent to whether we live

or die. I mean, if you’re lucky, you get 75 years, if you’re

really lucky you get 80 years, and if you’re extraordinarily

lucky , you get to live 50 of those years with a decent

head of hair.

I guess the question becomes if we knew we would only have our friends, our loved ones, for a brief time, would we treat them differently?  If we knew we only had a certain amount of time left would we live differently? Would we love differently?

Mom with her English major “where the hell is your conclusion” red pen comments, will I’m sure critique this ending, but I just don’t think there is an answer.  I mentioned in Part 1 that we persevere through grief, not so overcome by grief that we cannot go on. But I feel that sometimes we wish it would overcome us, not wanting that pain to end.  Isn’t the pain better than feeling nothing? Isn’t that what being jaded gets us? If we don’t learn the lessons, if we deny the possibility of death or loss, we can feel it fresh when it happens.  It can take us by surprise.  We don’t have to change. We don’t have to die.

        I'll be coming full circle and talking about how the horror genre has changed recently and pontificate on what that might mean about us in Part 3...