How To Bring A Loved One Back From The Dead

When the person you love most dies, it doesn’t hurt.

The word “hurt” implies that you feel something.

The truth is, all you really feel is numb.

I had two years to prepare for the death of my father.

The clock began ticking the day the phone rang in my homeroom class during my senior of high school.

My teacher picked up the receiver, listened intently, then hung up.

“You need to go to the front office,” he said.

When I arrived at the office someone handed me a phone, at the other end of which I heard my mother’s voice. In her WASPy tone – a tone which makes me cringe when I hear it come out of my own mouth – she began to give me the “facts.”

It’s a measured, concerned type of tone that attempts to convey the message, “yes, we have a situation here, but let’s take things step by step and not get ahead of ourselves.”

I hung in with her until the part about a brain tumor.

Everything after that’s a blank.

During a presentation at his office, my father had frozen on a word. He couldn’t get it out. Then he had a seizure and fell to the floor.

He was rushed to the hospital and given a CAT scan, which found the source of the problem. One of those annoying cancerous tumors had decided it would call his brain home.

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In the two years that followed there was plenty of sorrow and pain, and surprisingly, joy as well.

But still, nothing in those twenty-four months prepared me for the day we lowered his casket into the ground.

In the thirty years since I’ve thought about my father often.

He was the greatest person I’d ever known.

At the time of his death, I loved him more than I loved anyone else in my life, and only with the birth of my children have I loved someone more.

He was like me, but without the asshole part, possessing all my good traits and none of my flaws.

Eventually, I accepted the fact that he wouldn’t be there for the important and special events in my life. Yet the only thing I could never come to terms with was that he would never get to meet my children – or they him.

Then something amazing happened.

Something I never would have expected.

Something I never would have believed.

I had a dream.

Once, at a party, I noticed a large group of people surrounding a lady who was clearly holding court.

As I listened to the conversation, I realized that she was doing dream interpretation.

Enthusiastic and hopeful believers were peppering her with all sorts of questions, trying to discover the hidden meaning in their dreams.

Questions about unicorns, and rainbows, and swimming with dolphins flowed like water from the excited crowd.

I walked right into the middle of the circle and said to her with a straight face, “Last night, I had a dream I was in a pit of naked men, covered in honey. What do you think that means?”

Suffice to say, that’s generally how I feel about dream interpretation.

But this dream was different.

It was a powerful dream.

A dream where you not only see, hear, and smell the people, but you feel them.

In this dream, I was at home with my wife.

My daughter was playing in the yard.

With her grandfather.

My father.

There he was, albeit somewhat older, doing his patented “I’ve got your nose” gag, and making her squeal with laughter.

I watched from inside the house as my wife went about making dinner.

It did not strike me as unusual that my father was alive, well, and playing with his four-year-old granddaughter.

I just felt a sense of calm, of peace, and of all things being right with the world.

Then, in a split second, everything changed.

Suddenly, my daughter turned and ran into the street.

A sense of fear and dread that only a parent can understand ran through me.

I saw cars at the end of the street coming her way.

I saw the joy of my life ending.

I saw my reason for living gone.

Almost instantly, my father ran after her.

I bolted out of the house as well, but he had a head start and was closer.

She ran down the street, but though he tried, he could not catch up with her.

I pushed my legs furiously, watching the cars that were closing in on her, and I knew time was running out.

I passed up my father and came within a few feet of her.

Then, just as I thought everything was lost, I made a mad lunge – stretching out as far as I could – scooping her up into my arms and to safety.

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When I awoke, there was a quiet and a stillness that clashed with the frenzied dream, and at first, I was disoriented.

Slowly, I began the process of coming back to reality – the part where you remind yourself that “it was only a dream.”

Then something inside made me stop.

I wanted to hold onto the dream, but even more so, believe that it was real.

So, for the first and only time in my life, I chose the Orwellian concept of “doublethink” — choosing to not only believe something untrue is true, but actively forgetting the decision to do so — thus making it real.

I chose to believe that my father had visited and played with my daughter because the feelings in my dream were as real and valid as anything I’d ever felt in my life.

I also chose to understand that my father chasing after my daughter, and I passing him up and bringing her to safety, was a metaphor.

That the days when I watched him at his workbench, slowly and steadily bringing to life some project that my young mind could not fathom, were, despite how much I longed for them to linger, gone forever.

That I had gone from being the admirer to the admired.

From the protected to the protector.

It was a message telling me that I had passed from being just a son to a father in my own right.

This dream also helped me understand that my children could “meet” my father every day, through me, from the parts of me that were from him.

It’s three years later and I now have a two-year-old son.

As I watch him play, and learn, and grow, I look forward to the day my father comes to visit him as well.

Originally published April 4th, 2011.