I had a dream two nights ago that we had found mom a great living situation with another female senior in a two-bedroom apartment, someplace urban–you know how dreams are, you never quite know where the locale is, it is a subconsicous conglomeration, a phantasmagoric landscape. Anyhow, I met mom at a senior center, where she’d been showing up for lunch for a couple of days without her roommate. ‘Where is she?’ i asked. ‘She’s been tired lately. She sleeps all day. And she smells. I wish she’d take a bath!’
In a dream world, a sense of panic can still fire your pulse. Heading back to mom’s apartment, I found the lady dead in her bed, for at least a couple of days. Mom’s simpleminded interpretation, and subsequent cohabiting with a corpse, caused even greater horror in me. Woke up with a biley taste in my mouth.
A loved one’s memory loss can cause tremendous anxiety.