make_me_a_witness ovenbird My uncle died of a heart attack right before Christmas and when I dreamed of him, he died again, right in front of me, though I tried to save him. I tried. As he clutched his chest and his eyes grew wide in terror and pain I rummaged around in the store room of an abandoned hospital. I found a kit that contained a sterile syringe and a vial of nitroglycerin. Voices came from the dark corners of the room, yelling instructions that I rushed to follow. But I found the needle was clogged with sand, then I dropped it on the filthy floor, then I broke the end off completely while attempting to draw up the medication. At every stage I failed. And my uncle died, falling forward onto the cold surface of a stainless steel table. I wondered, after, why I would have such a dream. I don’t feel responsible for my uncle’s death. I don’t feel any guilt in relation to him at all. We had a relatively tangential relationship in life, friendly, but without depth or closeness. So why this dream in which I watched him die due to my own ineptitude? Many dreams are not truly about what happens on the surface. And I got to thinking that it might be about a misguided desire to “fix” a broken heart. It’s one thing to intervene to address physical suffering, but scrambling to end someone’s emotional pain rarely does anything to improve the situation. Just imagine the last time someone tried to “fix” your pain by looking for ways to end it. Chances are the interventions just added to the hurt because those interventions deny the reality of your suffering and insist that you stop feeling what you are feeling. So maybe the dream was a warning about the ineffective nature of concrete repair attempts when you’re faced with grief. I’m guilty, as I’m sure we all are, of wanting to take away the suffering that torments the people I love. I want to come in with chisels and hammers and saws and reshape the world so nothing hurts. But the destruction wrought through the remodelling process frequently leaves people more injured than they were before because they feel dismissed and unseen. I know that I suffer deeply when someone tries to dismiss my pain rather than allowing it. We all need people to say, “I will love you in your grief just as much as I will love you in your joy,” but so often it feels that love is withheld until we bury our grief and plaster an agonized smile on our faces. The dream reminded me that my job is not to fix anything, it’s to bear witness. Healing happens when broken hearts are allowed to be broken and we find ways to let sorrow and gladness coexist. My frantic attempts to save my dream uncle’s life did nothing to prevent his inevitable death and left me feeling guilty and distressed. So I took a moment to imagine what could have happened instead. I could have witnessed him in his suffering. I could have held his hand while he faced his end. I could have said, “It’s okay to be afraid,” and “you’re not alone.” I could have eased his transition from this life to whatever comes after. I forget, sometimes, how powerful that is–just being with everything that’s hard, without trying to change it. Sometimes I need a reminder. And sometimes that reminder comes in the form of a nightmare. 260113 what's it to you? who go blather from