Whenever I want you
All I have to do is dream

Oh for fuck’s sake. My dreams.

Sometimes I wake up and it’s a blank slate; I have no idea how I passed my hours of slumber. Sometimes I am rattled awake by the most vivid, intense dreams.

Lately they have involved my grandma. Yeah, the one that just died.

And somehow I’ve managed to tie in my house issues with my dead grandma issues.

For example, I dreamed I was taking my dog to board and it was at my grandma’s old house. They had changed the property a lot, so it took me a while to recognize it. But when I went inside, I could tell it was her house. Now, funny dreams, it wasn’t anything like her REAL house. But I seemed to really connect to these restaurant style booths and glass candle holders–like those were the leftover signs of grandma.

It made me cry.

The one last night was even weirder.

I was at her apartment with… her? My other grandma? I don’t know. But we were there to clean up because someone had died and we needed to empty out the space. I don’t know if it was her who had died (because in a dream you can go back to your own apartment even if you are dead), or my grandpa, but either way I was very worried about how upset she would be going into the apartment. She kept reassuring me it would be fine.

We went in and started vacuuming the floor. But not with the floor attachment, just the hose. How inefficient. She started trying to help me with a second hose (go figure) and I got all upset that she shouldn’t be having to do that.

So is this about my grandma, or about my struggles to clean and organize my own house? Is Grandma speaking to me from beyond the grave? Telling me to get off my ass and clean?

She never would have been so rude in real life. But she would have made it clear that sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do.

And I think that is part of what I will miss about her. She came from a time when you just did what you had to do. Life was hard, but you sucked it up and lived it.

She lived on a farm where you just gave birth, at home, whether the doctor had made it there or not. She watched her husband and two of her children die before her.

She just kept living.

And when it was near the end, and she was in a nursing home, and she was in a ton of pain from her physical therapy, she just kept trying. Cuz the only way out, was through. It was the task at hand, so that is what she did.

And I need that in my life. To push through the hard times (though they will never, ever be as hard as her life).

I need to just keep swimming. Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming.

If a 96-year-old woman could fight the good fight, so can I.

Right?