revisiting those good old stages of grief

One of those weird fuct up dreams last night:

My husband, my close friend/coworker "ZI", and some other coworkers set sail on a cruise/adventure voyage. It wasn't really a cruise, because we slept in quarters that had exposed pipes/strange passageways and there weren't any all-you-can-eat buffets, discos, or botulism outbreaks. My husband disappeared from the story line for awhile.

Sometime after that, one of my male coworkers asked me if I wanted to leave the cruise to go on his private sailboat for some real sailing. He told me we would see the Canary Islands, some famous archipelago, and other natural wonders. I was initially interested, but realized that he wouldn't be returning to the ship so ZI would have to cart all of my stuff around and apparently this male coworker and I would have to drive on land quite a bit to get home - it could take weeks, he said. It started to sound like a hassle, and it dawned on me that I would be completely alone with this dude and that he would probably be putting the moves on me. I politely declined.

Then my husband reappeared. Convenient timing. I was sharing a room with ZI, but when my husband came back, naturally I was sharing the luxury cabin (looked like a boiler room, with no real walls, but separate spaces for sleeping vs. stowage of trunks) with him.

Somehow we realized that we had a) taken our pet dog and cat along with us, and b) that we hadn't given them food or water since the trip began. We freaked out, first opening their cages, and only then running around trying to block exits from the room to the rest of the ship and entrances to weird crawl spaces they could get stuck in that we couldn't get them out of. Thankfully, while we did this, they seemed very listless and weren't giving chase.

I began a noble, but anxious, quest for kibble. I found a large yellow bag of some chow mix and tried to give some to my cat. She seemed uninterested at first, so then I took some to the dog, who devoured it. When I got back to my cat, she was laying limp on the cement floor of our room and she was sticky.

All of a sudden we were back home, in our actual house and there was a group of friends sitting at the kitchen table I had when I was growing up in Cambridge (but not in the red vinyl upholstered alcove it belonged in) smoking cigarettes just like in a picture I have of my mother and her circa-1965 friends. A phone rang. Someone I don't know (who might, upon morning's recollection, have been my "godfather" - a man named Peter who I don't think I ever met) answered the phone and offered it to my husband, saying "one of the animals died. I think it was Mina."

I began wailing and then woke myself up. When I'm in this state, after a bad dream, especially one where someone I love dies or my husband leaves me, I spend a minute or two in this weird limbo between consciousness and subconsciousness. I tend to seek my husband's body warmth and to whimper. He usually extends a groggy, but well-intentioned arm around my back and I hug a pillow. It's sort of pitiful.

Once fully awake, I looked for Mina, the cat. She was alive and well, naturally and noisily cleaning her privates, as cats are often wont to do. I checked her food and water. While she had plenty of kibble, her water dish was a quite low and the bottom of the bowl felt slimy, like I hadn't cleaned it in days. I felt an awful pang of guilt, cleaned it and filled it in the dark bathroom, and headed back to bed.