Someone asked me the other day if I ever had recurring nightmares. Although I have had my share of nightmares (like everyone else) and woken up shaking and scared many times, very rarely has the same one happened more than once. I remembered though that several years ago, I started having a recurring dream that has always stayed with me. The dreams started right after a friend of mine was brutally murdered. When I found out about her death, I felt a huge sense of guilt. She had been 21, young, beautiful, an entire life ahead of her and it was snuffed out in one moment. The last conversation we had was terribly trivial but she had been right there in front of me within my grasp. I couldn't help but wonder if by saying something, or not saying something, I could have changed the ultimate outcome of her fate; but then I feel terribly hopeless, because somehow it seems that her destiny was irrevocably sealed and decided.
So after she died, the dreams started. They were always the same; I would be dead, riding on my way somewhere with countless other people. We would arrive to the destination that allowed us passage to Paradise, and right at the thresh hold I was turned back. Always turned back. I would wake up with this feeling of disappointment. Why did I have the right to live while other's lives are cut short? Every day is a blessing, but who decides how many days we are blessed with or why we are blessed with so many or so few? I can't help but think that perhaps life is a series of near hits and misses with death. We may not know it, but this whole series of alternate events could exist. What if you hadn't stopped to tie your shoe before crossing the street? Perhaps that car running the red light would have it you. Or you decided at the last minute to take a different route home one night? Perhaps you avoided that mugger waiting in that same dark alley you usually walk down.
So what to do with the time that is given us? Perhaps the most difficult thing (at least for me) is to come to terms with the fact that we are all rushing towards the same end. Rich or poor, man or woman, we all die. So the issue at hand is how to grasp at this brief and transient life. How to accept the mystery of what really happens when we die. To determine if your faith will give you the strength to believe fully that there is a good place for your soul on the other side of that dark abyss.
Steinbeck wrote that the older we get the less obsessed with death we are. I suppose he meant that we come to terms with the concept when we are closer to it. As for me, I feel the older I get the harder it is for me to grasp and the concept gets more and more frightening. As for my dreams, they stopped when I realized that there is a great being looking out for me. I don't believe that I have any more of a right to live than anyone else, but all I can do is be thankful that I have been given the privilege to be alive on this day, in this hour, right at this very minute. I am scared of death, and although I wish I could change and control this fate, there is nothing to do but resign to the ultimate destiny that makes us all equals.
