January 24, 2017

Dear Henry,

I've been thinking about the dream I had a couple of weeks after you died.  I wrote about it before:  I’ve had only one dream (that I remember) that I think was about you. It was a couple of weeks after you died. I swam or flew somehow way out to the edge of nowhere. The sounds of the earth faded into the distance behind me. It was completely silent, completely gray and empty. I waited, looked, listened. Nothing. It felt like I was in a place where I didn’t belong. Remember that feeling? Like when you’re in an off-limits area, all alone? Suddenly I felt myself being pulled back, sucked under water, tossed about. I could see the clear water about me and the clear surface rippling far overhead. I saw the screen curtain of our apartment door, so I swam through it and popped to the surface. Then I woke up.

I think I was looking for you, Hen-Ben. Looking for #3, my skinny son Henry.


That place was so foreign.  It was like Genesis describes the world before creation.  It was without form, and void, and darkness was ..... well, it was darkness.  There was a horizon, far away, but it was just discernible because there were two shades of dark.  I was there, full of breath, and color, and life, and I knew that I did not belong in that place.  But I was determined to find you, to follow you wherever you had gone, and to grab hold of you and either bring you back, or, failing that, to be with you, wherever you were.  I asked Jim last night, where do you think that place was?  He thought, maybe, it was death.  And, Henry, you were not there.  And I did not belong there.  So I was sucked back into my life, painful as it was.  I had to come back and learn to live in this living, colorful, breathing world, without you.  I'm still working on that.  I know Jesus weeps with me, and that is comfort indeed.  I love you, my sweet Henry.  - Mama Pajama