Every night before I go to sleep I ask for my son Charlie to come to me in my dreams AND for me to remember it. I need him to let me know that everything is going to be oaky.
It’s been 1,085 days of asking Charlie to reveal himself and so far he’s only appeared once. The dream was shortly after he died in July 2022. It was a cheeky dream that made me laugh. There was nothing heavenly about it and it was pure Charlie trying to make me smile but no mention of “Everything is going to be okay.”
I imagine meeting Charlie at the end of my life and him saying that he was there in my dreams all along but not in ways I’d remember or recognize. He was there in the darkness of the night. He was there in the first light as I opened my eyes in the morning. He was there in the layers in between.
I’m curious how to dead show up for us. It’s different for everyone, isn’t it? Even writing that Charlie is dead doesn’t seem real because I can hear him say, “I’m very much alive.” And I know he is but not in the way I expect him to be.
Charlie was never a normal child so I am guessing he’s not going to be a normal spirit in the afterlife. Charlie didn’t have a normal childhood so I’m hoping he is dancing around his lifeline now getting the love and support he needed from family at various ages during his embodied time here.
Where I do connect with Charlie the most is in or near water. He was born on July 17, 1995. I’d spent the previous days and weeks swimming with my children Sam (age 5), Lucy (age 4), and Willie (age 2) at the pool at our country club in Indianapolis. I wore a white bikini that summer and when I’d stand in line at the snack bar with my kids in the final weeks of my pregnancy, you could often see the imprint of a tiny hand inside my huge tan abdomen reaching out from the world beneath my skin. It was not unusual for my kids to see so much of my pregnant body uncovered but it was a lot for others. This was a members-only club in the conservative midwest. I never wore maternity clothes. I wore what felt good on my body and in the summer of 1995, it was a tiny white bikini.
After Charlie was born, I returned to the pool within two weeks and would nurse him as I watched the other kids swim. Later in the summer, I’d hold him in the water letting just his toes touch but he always leaned forward wanting to go further in. When it got too hot at the pool I dropped Charlie at my godmother Betty’s home. She lived less than a mile away. The reason I was able to have four children in five years was because Betty was around to help with the oldest or the youngest or the two in the middle. Just like I loved going to Betty’s house when I was a child, my own children had the same experience of a safe loving bonus home.
During my childhood, Betty and her husband Bill (my godfather who died in 1991) always took me on trips with their daughters, Wendy and Cathy, who were 15 years older than me. After Bill died, my (then) husband and I took Betty on family trips with us. It was a bonus that she could babysit, especially for Charlie as a baby. No kid felt more loved than a child who spent time at Betty’s house.
In early 1996, Betty and I were talking about favorite trips she’d taken in her lifetime. She’d never been out of the U.S. She was 72 and didn’t have a Bucket List but she mentioned that she wanted to see the Grand Canyon. It was one of those moments when you get a zing in your body to pay attention so a few months later, I booked a trip for us to go to Phoenix and then take a day trip to the Grand Canyon. I decided to take just Sam and Charlie. Sam, being the oldest, had a special relationship with Betty, like I did when I was young. Charlie was ten months old at the time and still nursing so he had to come with us. In Phoenix, we stayed at a favorite resort and the boys and I got to swim while Betty supervised with a smile poolside. After taking me on many special trips when I was young, Betty now enjoyed ordering room service and charging it to me.
On the third day we made the drive to the Grand Canyon. It was an ambitious trip to make in one day. Four hours each way—but the boys and Betty enjoyed the drive and the change of scenery from Indiana. When we arrived at the Grand Canyon, I sat on a bench while Charlie nursed and watched as Betty held Sam’s hand and they stood at the edge of the South Rim and looked into the vastness of the stunning landscape. When Charlie was done nursing, we joined them and Betty looked at me with so much joy and wonder and said, “I’ve seen the Grand Canyon. Now I can die.”
We returned to Indiana later that week and then the pool at the country club opened for the summer season. It was a summer of hearing “Watch me, Mama” over and over again from my four children at the pool. It was the summer Charlie learned to walk and swim. It was the summer Betty went in for elective heart surgery on a Friday and was dead by Sunday.
When Betty died on July 28, 1996, Charlie had just turned one years old. I was devastated by Betty’s death. She had chosen to do the heart surgery because she was concerned that she got out of breath when she carried or played with my children. She wanted to keep up. She was seventy-two.
Four months after Betty died, I woke from a deep sleep and a dream where Betty came to me. She was sitting on the edge of my bed in a matching pink and light blue track outfit. It looked just like something she’d wear. She was stroking my hair and said me, “Everything is going to be okay.” I looked around the bedroom and no one was there but there was an imprint on the bed where she had been sitting near my head in my dream.
In trying to understand birth, death, spirit and the afterlife, I hear about “the veil” as being a way to describe the space between death and the afterlife. To me, it’s more of a porous fluid membrane where depending on the moment different things can pass through—a thought, a voice, a feeling, a rainbow, a dream. Like Charlie in my womb, I imagine he’s now in a new space reaching his hand for me or for his girls or for you or for anyone that needs to know that everything is going to be okay.
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