Ghosts of our Fathers

I found some Polaroid photographs last night from around 1980. They were of our back yard, growing up, and there was one of my father, bent over some little pine saplings, watering them with a red Folgers coffee can. Judging by my little brother's height in a picture that was in the set, I could calculate the year. That would make my father about 43 in the picture, 2 years younger than I am now.

That night, I dreamed about him again. In the dream, Dad was a quiet, almost ghostlike presence. He did not talk, but silently followed me around as I visited a customer and looked over a system of conveyors in order to recommend solution to some problem they were having. The customer was telling all about their problem and what they were needing, and I was asking questions. Dad was taking it all in, absorbing what the situation was, and I knew much of it was new to him. We were going to figure out the solution together.

That's the kind of occasional visit I get from my father. He comes to me now in my dreams. He passed away 17 years ago when he was 54. For the first 3 or 4 years after he died, I had a series of dreams about him, all similar. In the dream, I knew Dad was dead, but it was a joyous occasion, because he got to come back to visit. I knew it was ... not miraculous, but a rare gift that he got to come back to see me. He was always relaxed and in a good mood. All the stresses of life were gone, lifted off his back, and you could tell he was lighter. We got to have a short visit, talk about things for a while, and that was it. I would wake up on those days feeling great, not even a little bit sad.

I don't remember how many of those dreams I had or for how many years, but I don't remember having them for a long while. However, now they've come back and they aren't quite the same flavor.

I think the dreams come from me, not from the great beyond. I studied dreams as a juvenile fascination when I was in Junior High, even kept a dream journal for some years. I learned that the subconscious mind was trying to communicate to the conscious mind, and could only do it through the dream state. The subconscious can't communicate like the conscious mind, so it creates these stories, dreams, that have the information embedded in them. Usually, the subconscious is trying to tell the conscious mind about something that it either figured out or noticed that the conscious mind missed. Once you had been journaling for a while, and thinking about what the dreams might be trying to say, you could start to figure them out. There was usually a metaphor, play on words, or some kind of analogy that would be involved. The message was never blatantly and directly in the dream, always alluded to or hinted at. It was a great deal of fun, because once you learned how to interpret them, it was easy. I found out a lot of things about fellow students, friends, and family, simply by paying attention to my dreams.

I used to say that someone never truly dies as long as people remember them. The corollary for this is fame, people who have achieved recognition through their discoveries, writing, creations, or public deeds have a form of immortality (or at least extended lifetime). This was a little something that I used to tell myself when my father died, always believing in the back of my mind that it was a transparent attempt to comfort myself. On one level, it's undeniably true. A person's actions and convictions during their life, or their life's work, continues on after they are gone. It's sort of a different expression of the themes of religion. Heaven is where people go to live on after life on earth.

So this semi-mystical, semi-religious way of looking on the rosy side of things has been percolating through the back of my head for many years.

Lately it's come home to roost.

I finally figured out that my cousin, whose father also died early, also has a ghost hanging around. I spent a lot of time thinking about the times my father spent with his father and how much fun they had. I think the efforts in life of the fathers cannot help but boost or channel the children along their paths. In the simplest form, you learn from school and parenting, and that lays the foundations of your thinking. You watch the experience of your parents and you either follow in their footsteps, building on their successes, or you avoid their pitfalls (hopefully - I suppose some follow the misdeeds).

So I had an Easter vacation going down to a place my Dad loved to visit, able to remember his ways and my Uncle's when reminded by the familiar surroundings.

This is one ghost I can live with quite comfortably.