The Great Everything

The Great Everything

I woke from a dream where I was at the doctor being told I had what my dad has, only worse.

In the dream, the damage had already been done.

Not something that might happen.

Not something to watch for.

Something already there.

My mom was with me. My son Dylan was there too. Somehow we all already knew before the doctor said it out loud.

My dad has never been officially diagnosed. He consciously chose not to be. I think he is afraid it would terrify him. Even writing that feels holy, because I understand it. In the dream, though, a word was used plainly. Alzheimer’s. I told my aunts that’s what it was, and hearing it come out of my own mouth felt strange, almost foreign.

I was crying in the dream.

At one point, I was suddenly looking for my mom. I wanted her to know I had decided I was going to stop eating and drinking and let my body die. She completely understood. I didn’t want anyone to have to stop their lives while my brain deteriorated. I didn’t want to be watched that way. I didn’t want the long unraveling.

So much of that dream felt shaped by what I’ve been reading lately about death, hospice, and what it means to let go of the body. Not in a dramatic way. In a practical way. In a human way. What it asks of the dying person. What it asks of the people who love them.

Then the dream did what dreams do. It kept moving.

I began waking up inside it, wondering how I would care for my dad if I had the same diagnosis. Wondering how a person even begins to release their body. Wondering about what my uncle calls the Great Everything.

And somewhere in the middle of all that fear, something else was there too.

My family.

When I was younger, family felt scary to me. It felt full of rules and opinions and ways of being that I judged as hypocritical and mean. But age has a way of rearranging the furniture. The last few years, I’ve come a little closer to my aunts and uncles, and I’m grateful for that.

What I see now is different.

Now family feels like my people doing the best they can.

I didn’t know it then, but I was the one being harsh. I was the one locked inside rules and opinions. They were just people. Limited, human, imperfect people. Same as me.

I don’t have a lot of friends. These days, I find myself building friendship with my family instead.

They are the ones who have known me my whole life.

They know the history.

They know the chapters.

And somehow, they still love me.

It isn’t always easy. I’m not especially good at it. I don’t always have the bandwidth for closeness, and I definitely don’t have much bandwidth for starting over with new people. But there is something deeply relieving about being loved by the ones who already know where you’ve been.

That feels close to what I imagine the great everything might be.

Not some far-off place.

Not only something we enter when the body is done.

Maybe it is also this.

Being known.

Being held in the long history of a family.

Being loved anyway.

And if that kind of love is available now, in imperfect forms and ordinary people, why not live in it now?