Sometimes, it helps me to remember that we knew this was possible, so I reached for my journal from this spring, and opened to a random page. Tuesday, April 26, 2011. The day after she'd had her MRI - the one that we later learned showed one additional small lesion in her brain, the one that informed the decision to have brain radiation. But we didn't know any of that then.
At 5:30 a.m., she'd awakened in pain, after being restless much of the night. I encouraged her to take pain pills, and I held her for a while. She'd had a bad dream. In it, she was living in a basement - Nicole's, she thought, though Nicole doesn't have a basement in real life. She'd been invited up to the main house, and she was so excited to be up with people that she forgot about the cats she'd been taking care of in the basement. She said she hadn't been feeding them, and she knew no one else was either. I thought she was going to say she found them all dead when she returned, but instead, she said that they were just so sad that she'd forgotten them. The cats she named had all died some time ago - Prudence, a couple of Colleen's cats, some others - none of the cats that are alive or that had died recently.
I asked if she was afraid that she'd be forgotten, and she sobbed that yes, that was what it was. At first, she'd assumed the dream was about her being incompetent and she didn't know why it bothered her so much. When I wrote about it, I noted that her dream could have been about many things: feeling isolated in her illness (confined to the basement), feeling like she's not contributing (a common complaint she made when her pain and fatigue were severe), and fear that she wouldn't be remembered.
She was able to get back to sleep, and she slept well. Belly, our big lovable cat, joined her on the bed when she woke in the morning, and she had a wonderful time loving him up.
Belly comforted me last night, too. As did the knowledge that Sandy hasn't been forgotten, and she won't be forgotten.
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