Crossposted on my FB Wall, without the italics following:
Three years ago this community rallied to my family's need. This week, we do the same for several of our fellow Kossacks who are in the process of letting go of loved ones and letting go of those who have already gone.
I haven't been sure what to say, only that I had much more to say that 'sorry' and much more to do that click a tip jar and a rec button. Then my subconscious stepped up, for it seems it's a Kossack, too. So here goes.
About 75 minutes ago I woke up from a dream that MKK and I had twins. New ones. A boy and a girl. And the boy could stand up and walk from the get-go. He was talking by the time he got home from the hospital. And grew up crazy fast. Like Otto the Fish fast.
The downside being the boy also aged super fast. Last I saw of him in the dream he was foiling some villainous plot and waving behind a locked... ahem... space ship airlock window. (I did say it was a dream).
Later, after he'd basically lived a full life in a single day, found he'd somehow been keeping an online diary from the moment he was born. Like a built in smart phone or something. Anyway the first entry was "Ok, I'm outta here. Hello, World!" Later posts were much more involved, but later on decayed into statements more typical of infancy or dementia. "Discomfort...bottom..."
The girl was just a cute snuffling peanut that slept and looked cute and developed quickly. Flash forward to college and she was a spitting image of Mary. Biggest local news story was that school she was going to had overstated its elevation to keep from having to relocate due to rising sea level, and therefore keep getting money from the state. It was all quite the scandal.
Strange dreams even for yours truly. I hadn't had one like that since I was in the hospital three years ago.. which is probably why I had it. Another reason - a year ago this week my grandmother died at the age of 100. Talk about rich full lives.
And maybe the point of the dream, insofar as dreams ever come with pithy life-enriching commentary, is that life, whether a day or a century long, is painfully short no matter how joyful it might be.
And people take their lives at their own (and often very different paces). How long we live and how quickly we do so - this separates us more completely than any of the many superficial ways on which we hang our many judgments of self and other.
But at the beginning and the end of our respective days, we say the same two things. We say hello. And then We say good-bye.