Visitation

Last night, I had a visit from Rick. I had blogged and I was watching TV with the cats. It was about 11:00 pm and suddenly a loud crash sounded in the kitchen. I jumped a mile and so did both cats. Completely freaked out, I went into the kitchen to see what had happened.

There was a metal cookie sheet lying on my stovetop, because I had made mozzarella sticks earlier and had left the sheet there to cool. And right there in the middle of the cookie sheet was a little bear. One of the bear salt and pepper shakers that Rick had bought me since we are the Bairs. The crash was the sound of the bear dropping onto the cookie sheet. The thing is, the bear salt and pepper shakers weren't in a place where they could have fallen onto the cookie sheet...or placed that strategically.

I took a photo of the event with my phone and laughed as I texted my friend Jennifer to tell her excitedly what had just happened since I knew she would still be awake. It's such a Rick thing to do. And I was pretty certain it was his way of telling me to go the hell to bed.

Well, last night... for the first time since he died... I dreamt about Rick. It was, unfortunately, the kind of dream you wake up from and feel all mixed up and sad, though. In my dream, I discovered that Rick wasn't really dead at all. He had instead been staying at a rehab place of some kind and was getting well. I was so glad to see him, because I thought he had been dead. I was telling him about how I had been blogging for almost 3 months and that now it was all unnecessary because I wasn't really a widow. I was telling him that everyone thought he was gone and we had to explain it to all of them.

Then I woke up, confused and hurting. It wasn't real. He is really dead.

And just as my mind was about to say, "He is really gone," I thought NO. He isn't. That's what the loud little bear and the dream were all about. He's never really gone.