Dreaming
Author’s Note: In last week’s post, I shared the words of my sister, Lynn, at my mother’s passing. These are my own.
My mother passed away on January 19th. In the weeks leading up to her passing, as she wasted away from dementia, unable to eat or drink, I found myself thinking about dreaming. And I created the two videos that appear in this post. At first, I didn’t know why I was thinking about dreaming or creating videos about it. But I think I do now.
My dad was what you might call a presence. (The photo in the post linked here was taken after he was sworn in as First Selectman in Old Lyme, Connecticut, where he and my mom lived at the time. I was photobombing because I’d managed his campaign.) He was social, outgoing, the quintessential gregarious Irishman. He loved being engaged. He was President of the Connecticut Jaycees, 1958-1959. He was involved in Civitan when they lived in Meriden, Connecticut. When they moved to Old Lyme, he was on the Planning and Zoning Commission before being elected First Selectman.
In 1998, they moved to Murrell’s Inlet, South Carolina. They lived in a golf community called Indigo Creek. As soon as he was able — and when he wasn’t on the links with the neighborhood pals he quickly met — he served on the community’s Drainage Committee. And when he wasn’t doing either of those things, he and another crew of his buddies would shuttle cars around the Carolinas and Georgia for Hertz. He was really good at everything except doing nothing.
They moved back, to Madison, Connecticut, in 2011. The pattern continued.
And Then …
Mom’s life was Dad. When he played golf, she’d get up at 0:Dark:30 to make his breakfast. (None of Dad’s golf pals could believe she did that.) When he went to Drainage Committee meetings, she’d stay home. When he drove for Hertz, she’d stay home. When they socialized, they did it together after Dad made all the arrangements.
Mom’s devotion to Dad was wonderful, of course. But when Dad passed away, my siblings and I were shocked to see how lost she was. She’d never made a life for herself. She held a number of jobs, part- and full-time. But she never had a sense of herself. She never found a cause, a purpose, or a calling. If she dreamed of things, of doing things, she never followed those dreams or pursued them in any meaningful or fruitful way.
The first time I went to have dinner with Mom after Dad passed, she was cutting peaches to make one of her favorite desserts: baked peaches with brown sugar and maple syrup. She was crying. When I asked why, she said, “Dad always used to cut the peaches.” It was heartbreaking.
The Moral
Clichés abound: You have to stay active as you age. You have to remain occupied. You have to keep your mind and your body stimulated. You have to continue to create new neural pathways to keep your brain from stultifying. All true. But more than anything, you need to have a purpose. You need to have a dream.
Over the course of a lifetime, different things may get you out of bed in the morning. But if you take them one at a time, you’ll always have at least one thing worth getting up for. And the more you dream, the more you’ll have.
By reading to me as a child, you gave me the dream of being a writer, Mom. I’m a writer. I wish you’d been able to do more dreaming.
Originally Published on https://www.bizcatalyst360.com/category/lifecolumns/notes-to-self/
