Dreams in Color
Cold. Alone. Dead. These were the few words that registered among the many spoken to me on that horrific afternoon when they came to tell me my son was gone. Fentanyl was added to the mix over the coming hours.
“Who? What? How?” repeated over and over again was all I could muster in response.
“We don’t know,” was their answer.
My living, breathing nightmare had only just begun.
In the one thousand three hundred forty-three days since, the torment of living the rest of my life without my child has only been interrupted four times by dreams of him. Though a dazzling nineteen-year-old when he passed, he comes to me as a small boy, a swoop of blond hair cascading down over wire-rimmed glasses framing eyes wide with wonder. His long, thick eyelashes brush against the inside of scratched lenses with every blink. Freckles dot the bridge of his aquiline nose and the pale, smooth skin over his soft cheeks. His azure-blue eyes hold me fast, my head, arms, and legs anchored to the bed. I cannot look away.
Each encounter is awash in a vibrant hue, the first occurring a week after my son died. He appears in profile in front of a wall painted in gradations of muted red like a Mark Rothko block painting—red, the color of danger. He slowly turns to me. I can see he is stunned and lost, and his imploring gaze is questioning. The scene goes dark, and we are transported to a magical family trip to Madrid several years prior and an excursion to the Museo Reina Sofia. We are standing before Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, its twisted images of violence and chaos drawing us in.
“Whoa, that’s a hella famous painting, right?” my son asks, his brow furrowing as he processes the vignettes splayed across the canvas.
My heart leaps when I hear his voice, clear and bright. This is the longest I have ever gone without hearing it. My eyes follow his and come to rest on the left side of the piece. A mother, contorted in sorrow, is holding her dead child.
I blink and am returned to the room with the red wall. My own child is again in profile, with reddish froth at the corner of his mouth. A woman has joined him. I know her. Jasmine is her name—a curious name for a blond, six-foot-tall medical examiner. “Evidence of a foam cone indicates a pulmonary edema,” she says, her voice bouncing off the bare walls. “A common phenomenon in overdoses.”
“Stop!” I try to scream, but the words tangle among my limp vocal cords. My boy turns back to me, but his eyes are now closed. I can see dark sutures among his eyelashes, and a brush of reddish color applied to his lips by a well-meaning mortician stands out against his grey skin. “Why?” I whisper.
A second dream follows several months later. This time, I find myself in a library reading room with dark stained bookshelves, the walls above them painted green. It is not the vivid green of youth and renewal but a more foreboding shade of envy and misfortune. At the far end of the room stands a black marble hearth. There is no fire within, only a pile of ashes that appear to have been there for some time. Gargoyles with leering grins and teeth filed to razor-sharp points adorn the corbels beneath an ornately carved mantel, ready to ward off evil spirits. They are too late. The demons have already come and gone. A lone wooden armchair faces the fireplace. A figure stirs in the seat, a little boy. While his face is half-hidden by the chairback, I know it is my son. His blue eyes are swollen and red from crying. His face is pale, and a crust of bloody foam still clings to his chapped lips.
“Momma,” he calls to me, his voice raspy and hoarse. “It’s bad. Really bad.”
“I know,” I say and start to approach.
I am immediately dragged away through a vortex of rapid-fire memories bombarding me from all directions before waking. I curl my body into itself and weep into my pillow.
Weeks, months, and nearly two agonizing years pass. As I fall asleep each night, I pray that I will dream of my child. I am confident that he must surely be waiting for me beyond the next somnolent bend. But I am beholden to unconscious powers that drive my circadian rhythm, and whatever God I once thought might intervene to ease my anguish is deaf to my cries. I resent my husband for rousing me for work and our daughter for coming to retrieve me for morning coffee. How dare they! In these moments, as sleep slips away, so does any chance of seeing my boy. He is unbearably beyond my grasp, and I am once again relegated to the vagaries of an unquiet conscious mind.
At long last, he visits me. Nothing particular in the weeks and days beforehand would have offered a warning. It will be some months before the next uncelebrated birthday arrives, and the college graduation that will never be has long passed. This time, my dream is rendered in white, the color of purity and innocence. I squint into the searing brightness, trying to focus, but my eyes burn and water. In the distance, an assemblage of people moves fluidly like a pale river among a grove of gnarled oak trees. There is no sound other than birds chirping, their song muffled as if submerged beneath water.
A flicker of movement dissonant with the pulse of the crowd draws my attention. It is him. My son is still a young boy but appears to be dressed in clothing several sizes too big. I recognize the outfit from the last time I saw him alive: a pristine, starched white t-shirt, ripped jeans, and his favorite Air Force One sneakers. He is hurried and intent, walking toward a familiar sandstone building on the university campus where he died. He reaches a set of stairs leading to the entrance but pauses on the first step and looks around as if someone has called to him. I am quiet and still, waiting for him to notice me. He scans the group around him and then looks out beyond the throng. There is a moment of recognition as our eyes lock. He smiles and quickly waves before bounding up the stairs and into the building. The river of bodies closes the space he once filled, continuing to ebb and flow among the trees.
I feel three taps on my shoulder and open my eyes. At first, I cannot discern if it is still part of the dream, but when I realize I am awake, I wonder if my child might be reaching out from beyond. Oh, how I have wished over these terrible years that those we have lost do come back to visit. I stare out my bedroom window into the early morning light and gently caress the spot where I am convinced a loving hand across time, space, life, and death has touched me. I am sure it is my son, no matter what anyone might say.
It will be another year before I dream of him again. Not for lack of trying. Each night, I close my eyes tight and will myself to remember. They say dreams are made of whatever is bumping around in your brain as you fall asleep. So, I am convinced that if I think about him hard enough, it can only help. Sometimes, I even pull out my special box filled with keepsakes, pictures, and a stick of Old Spice Deodorant to remind me of his smell. Nothing helps. No dreams. Finally, just before the third anniversary of his death, when I have all but given up, he returns.
It is a sunny winter day, and the sky is an unseasonably calm and serene shade of blue. I am driving along an unfamiliar country road, trees towering above me on both sides. I stop at a lone stop sign in the middle of nowhere and hear the car door open. I glance into the rearview mirror as my son slips into the back seat. He buckles his seatbelt and settles in as though nothing has changed. Like I am simply picking him up from soccer practice. He’s in a navy blue GAP t-shirt and shorts. He is sweaty, and his cheeks are flushed. He scoops his long bangs to the side with his slender fingers, nails bitten to the quick. He edges his funny sports glasses up his nose—contracting and releasing the muscles along its bridge until the frames are in place. He smiles and raises an eyebrow, curious about why I am staring at him. He shrugs and rolls his eyes in that irresistibly playful way he always had. I press the accelerator, and we drive on together in silence.
It is the first time I have slept through to the end of a dream about my son. I am not hurled back to consciousness from within my sleep state nor torn from my slumber by outside forces. I am allowed to linger and to feel him on my terms. The warmth of him envelops me and holds me tight. I cannot look away. And I don’t want to.
My boy will never be able to explain why, and over the past three and half years, those in a position to tell me who, what, and how have refused to do so.
“We cannot share that information,” they now say, and when pressed, they simply “do not recall.”
And so my waking nightmare continues. Dreams of him are my only solace. I desperately hope my beloved child comes to me again—whatever the hue and however long it might take. He is worth the wait.
-J. E. Weiner
J. E. Weiner is a writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she has spent nearly two decades working in higher education, crafting print, online, and film narratives for transformational philanthropic campaigns. She is now telling her own stories of a life imbued in equal measure with humor and heartbreak, the most recent of which appeared in the literary journals Madcap Review and Five Minutes. Weiner is currently completing a collection of memoir essays titled Fentanyl Fallout: A Mother’s Lamentations, recounting the darkest days of grief following her son’s death from an accidental overdose.