In the Spring of 1976 I sang in my high school choir. It was my senior year and I performed a duet from the Disney Song Catalog that year. We sang the opening lines to "A Dream is a Wish" (1950) Cinderella. My duet partner sang the opening line and I sang the following line..."in dreams you will lose your heartache..." then the chorus followed up with "no matter how your heart is grieving, if you keep on believing" ....I could not have predicted how true or relevant that song would become in my life until later.
Today, I am ending the year of saying the Mourners Kaddish for the death of my mother next month in January. During this year I have been expressing my mourning as real pain in my back. I have suffered back pain as I have never suffered it in the past and have tried many treatments for it with some success. I do not go to sleep in pain but through the process of vivid dreaming I wake up in pain. I believe the pain, my mother's death and my dreams are connected. I have not figured out why aside from the obvious that I am angry and stressed that she has left me and this stress is doing physical damage to my body, specifically my back.
Last night again, I was up in the middle of the night with pain and rather than taking a pain reliever, I decided to ignore the pain and try to shift position and go back to sleep. Again I had a vivid dream only this time my mother came to me in my dream. She gave me a big hug and I told her that I loved her and I knew that she loved me too. At that moment I realized my pain was gone and I fell back to sleep. Was this real? Who knows but it really doesn't matter. I still have pain. The phsyical damage does not magically go away completely, but it suggests that if I ever need to contact my mother I know I can always find her in my dreams and for now that is enough for me.
This experience brings me back to the only solo I had when I was in high school. I did not understand the true meaning of the words to that song until now as a mid-life adult. I think perhaps the writers of that lyric understood, too, a second meaning. Maybe they weren't speaking of a parent but you can feel loss in the words to that song very powerful and very cleverly disguised in a children tale. The end of the song is not sad and neither is the end of a grieving period. One purpose of mourning is that the mind, through our dreams, cleanses the spirit of grief as we move back to a happy life. Jewish tradition says that the departed soul must move on and that the Mourners Kaddish prayer daily recited must eventually stop so that family members will move on too.
