Here is a quick early morning dream I had under the influence of the waning moon: My grandmother Diddie (that’s Virginia Culpeper Wellendorf Creely to the rest of you) was a major influence in my life, a trite phrase that does nothing to capture the importance of our relationship. If I was Harry Potter shivering under the stairs, she was Hedwig. If I was Taran, swinging a sword stupidly while making brash statements about who I was and who I thought I could be, she was Dalben, looking up from her book and offering dry and precise utterances about the truth of the matter. If I was— excuse me, when I was— lost, confused, frightened, unaware, self-hating, doubting and imperfect, she was there inside my personal ecology, which was characterized by a horrible isolation from myself that I barely survived.
She was the golden woman in the center of my darkness, stern but very human, ameliorative, authoritative and loving. Betsy dear, she would say, have you considered, are you thinking about, have you seen….Betsy dear, she would say, do you know? Usually I did not know.
When Diddie died in 2001 I had a dream about her, a common dream for people to have about a beloved who has died. You may know the one: they appear looking healthy, whole and happy. Perhaps they have a bit of a glow to them. If your mind whispers to you, this is not possible. This person is dead, you may still comprehend that they, somehow, still exist.
Diddie showed up a week after her death. She was leaning against my parent’s kitchen counter, clad in a crisply ironed white shirt dress, the type she favored (Betsy dear, she told me once, trousers do not suit women. She meant short-waisted women like she and I. And she was right. I look better in a dress.) I noted that she was carefully groomed: she was wearing Estee Lauder frosted apricot lipstick, and her blonde hair was waved. Her face was relaxed and radiant with happiness and good humor. Although I knew she was dead, I also knew that she lived, that she still was. Death is not the enemy, my dad told me.
Diddie contented herself with that one glowing appearance and then took off for parts unknown, until two nights ago when she re-appeared. In the dream, I was wandering around aimlessly in a garden bordered by mucky, swampy mud and filled in the center by two small pools. They were configured like a figure 8 laid down flat. The first pool had some water in it; the second pool had almost none at all. The water was quickly percolating out of it, causing the mud to quiver and shimmer. I didn’t like being in the mucky garden: the mud felt unclean, too organic, too busy with small insects. Putrefaction was afoot in this garden and although I felt I was there on some mission, I was— of course— completely confused about what the mission was, exactly. And then in the middle of my puzzled disgust, Diddie showed up.
It was a dramatic appearance: she stood before me, visible against a dark background with her hands extended toward me. Do you remember the upper garden, she asked and suddenly I saw pink gladiolus, and other flowers bright and blooming and colorful: pink, orange, all illuminated by the sun and as vivid as life itself. Do you remember, she asked again, insistently. I said yes, Diddie I do. I remember! I remember the upper garden! And then I did remember, in one quick moment: there was a garden I had known once and then forgotten.
Get the bulbs, she said. You have to get the bulbs of the, and the words she used to describe the bulb of the flower were words of deep meaning with no equivalent in English or any spoken language on this earth. I repeated the unreal word in hopes of understanding more. Get the bulbs, she said again with some agitation, her hands in front of her, palms up, in the manner of an urgent plea. Get the bulbs. You have to….
It went on from there in much the same manner. She told me more, but I was engrossed in my conversation with her and didn’t remember to remember her directions. I fall into lucid dreaming very easily, but find that when I do, the mythic content of the dream becomes compromised. It’s your consciousness or the dream’s consciousness, I find. The two don’t co-exist.
The next morning I told my friend Tarin about the dream, and she asked, what did she want you to do with the bulbs? I couldn’t answer. I didn’t remember what she said; I only remembered Diddie’s entreaty: the position of her body against the dark and her hands held out that way urging me to get the bulbs and…
What did she want me to do with the bulbs? Plant them in the muck and mire of the Lower Garden? What happens when you take vibrant life and put it in relationship with putrefying death? Death is not the enemy, my dad told me as he choked back tears while his father, my beloved grandfather Bunster Creely, Diddie’s husband, was loaded into an ambulance after suffering a Transient Ischemic Attack in my parent’s backyard, one sunny Christmas day.
Death is not the enemy: these are plain English words spoken on this earth, words that have been spoken to me urgently in waking life. This sentence, this communication is also gestural and Diddie showed me what that gesture was: hands outstretched, and the urgent repetition of the name of a unknown flower. Maybe I’ll somehow discern and say the name of this flower— correctly and often— and find and plant its bulb. And then I’ll start asking this question: What is this ecology?
Written under the influence of the Waning Piscean moon.
Great for dream-work; not so great for work-work or business communications about non-existent MOU’s and contracts.
By the by, Gladiolus symbolize remembrance and are associated with August according an entirely non-scientific Google search.
Elizabeth Creely 