I finished moving files off my computer to my work OneDrive — something I should have been using long before now. There’s not a lot of work left to do, and I am required to work all day Friday. I have two meetings tomorrow, well, actually one meeting (overhead) and one goodbye Zoom-ish meeting.

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I find dreaming a delight, unless it is a nightmare, then that is the opposite of a delight. I’ve been dreaming a lot lately about travel; either being somewhere other than here, or being at an airport or on an airplane. Although in my waking dream this morning my cousin, Beth, and I went to prom together, or we were planning on going to prom and were in the middle of prom practice. All of these dreams could have been delights, but Covid-19 influenced all of them. In these dreams I either forgot my mask or people around me were showing symptoms of the virus. So, although these dreams were not quite nightmares, neither were they delights.

I remembered one delightful dream I had exactly 4 years ago, though:

I flew to Illinois when my brother called and told me that the visiting nurse said our mother had only days left to live. I arrived around nine at night and after sitting next to my mother’s rented hospital bed in my brother’s dining room for a few hours, we decided we should move into the living room and try to get some sleep. I slept fitfully at first, hearing the raspy sound of my mother’s breathing, the death rattle. Finally I slept, and dreamed.

In the dream, my mother tried to get out of bed but her pastor (not Pastor Keith, but the one who took over for him) pushed her back onto her bed and enlisted us to help. Mom (now a slender, black-haired teen again) pushed past those of us trying to keep her in the bed and ran to the window, stood on her tiptoes and fluttered her hands behind her. She did this with every window in the room (which was a huge room full of many windows), like a moth to a flame. The pastor was still insisting we put her back into bed. As she passed me I grabbed her and tried to hold her in a tight hug but then she dissolved into hundreds of sparkles of light and I felt a shock of electricity fly up my arms and into my heart. The sparkles of light flew out the nearest window and I briefly woke up and could no longer hear my mother struggling to breathe in the next room.

When I awoke again later, my brother told me Mom was gone, but I already knew it because I saw her spirit become part of the air.