Dreaming of Her Once More

Sometimes I dream of death. Since my wife died I have not been my usual cheery self. I have become morbid to the extreme of driving half my friends away and I just can't see the point any more. So I spend my time cocooned in absinthe and opium, only to find that I have come to desire destruction as a means to be with you again. Sooner or later I shall be joining you within death's deepest darkness where the dead curse the living for their own sins, and for the sins of their forefathers. The needle pierces my skin just above the forearm in the crook of the elbow as I take another hit of scag. The brown bitch inebriates me and my head drops forward upon my chest as my breathing slows to barely any trace of life or breath, and she swarms within my vision and enters my dreams.

I see her dancing to life itself as the mid June sun caresses the fields just outside of the Medway Towns where we both used to live. Those days were heady and free from all pain. I'd raise my eyebrows in that all-knowing way which used to drive her nuts and she'd try to laugh it off like some obscure private joke. Then she would pirouette across the fields like some dream of a ballet dancer, and I would just roll my eyes up to heaven. She'd jump upon my chest and choke me in her love and the scent of womanhood.

The razor tears my skin at the top of my wrists as I float in the memory of her. The gash that the razor tore runs red and my shirt is stained with blood and tears as I try to join her in death. I no longer want to live without her, and death is the only way out of my pain for the loss of her light in my life.

I remember the way I would sneak in as she took a shower. One she had lathered up her hair and put her head under the stream to wash the shampoo from her locks I would reach round the side and turn the water on cold. She'd scream obscenities at me in a light-hearted way and pull me in fully clothed. We'd kiss passionately under the shower head before I'd go down upon my knees and take her in my mouth. She tasted of honey and fresh salmon, and I treated her sex like a seven-course meal before I took the rest of her as dessert. We'd end up in a sweaty heap upon the shower floor fully sated and worn out by passion, only to have to take another shower to wash off each other's fluids before getting dressed up for dinner. She'd cook and I'd choose the wine and set the table. We'd have Classic FM playing in the background as we shared and played with our food.

There is a knock at my door and I find that I'm too weak to get up and answer it. The arms of my easy-chair are soaked with my own blood and I realise that I have lost a lot of the stuff. The knocking gets louder and I tell whoever it is to fuck off and leave me alone. Suddenly the door caves in and I am confronted by two paramedics and several police officers. One of them swears under his breath as they struggle to hold me down as the medics get on with the job of patching me up as best as they could before rushing me to hospital. What Jesus Christ has got to do with this situation I will never know, but I cannot be bothered with his religious outbursts or his attitude to those who just want to be left alone to die. By this time I am throwing punches and swearing at them to leave me alone, and they have to restrain me before they can get me into the ambulance.

I am losing quite a lot of blood so I find myself hallucinating as they rush me off to hospital. She is standing before me as naked as the day she was born, but her face has become a skull, and I can see flesh and tendons hanging off from it. As she grins her arm falls off and I look down to see it crawling with maggots and I feel like throwing up. Then she starts laughing at me and calling me every obscene name under the sun. Before my eyes she decays into a pile of stinking flesh and bile, and I scream out loud like I never have done before.

One of the paramedics is shaking me by the shoulders as the ambulance pulls into the casualty wing of the Bournemouth Royal Hospital. I come out of it long enough to see her putting an IV line into what is left of my forearm. I try to remove it from my arm but my body will no longer respond to my wishes. My arm aches as the saline drips, drips, drips into my arm at the crook of my elbow, and I feel faint with the loss of blood. I fall asleep as they wheel me towards one of the many crash rooms where people either die or survive, and my last thought before I slip away is "am I going to be unlucky enough to wake up from this?"

I am now dreaming of her as doctors and nurses swarm around my prone body, trying to piece me back together again as best as they can. It is near to Christmas and we are out shopping at Lakeside Thurrock. There are children all around staring bright eyed and rosy cheeked at the animated Snow White and the Seven Dwarves that was so kindly provided by one of the larger department stores within the Mall. She is laughing at one of Santa's Little Helpers who looks like he has just got out of bed upon the wrong side this morning and is being overwhelmed by a swarm of five to eight year olds dragging nagging mothers and henpecked fathers towards the displays of candy and toys in front of Santa's Grotto. He looks up at the heavens in despair and I laugh at the joke which I can now see. As we head off to the second floor café overladen with multi-coloured shopping bags I am left wondering about the credit card bill and how I am going to pay it off over the next six months. We order hot fresh bagels with cream cheese and lox, coffees with cream and a sticky bun each. The waitress hands me over a bill for ten pounds and I nearly have a cardiac arrest right there upon the spot. My wife and my lover offers to pay and I say "What's the point? It's still coming from the same account." She still insists and pays the woman despite my chivalrous protests. We eat from each others hand before making the long car journey back to Chatham and our home upon the Davis Estate.

I wake up to find myself in a hospital bed with my parents looking worried over me. I haven't seen them for six months and they had stopped sending me money because they knew I'd spend it on drugs and wouldn't even bother to buy any food with it at all. Dad is trying hard not to shout at me and Mum is busily bawling her eyes out upon his shoulder. An automatic drugs dispenser is attached to my drip. Every so often it would give me a dose of Morphine Sulphate, and I'd find it hard to stay awake. There is no button at my wrist just in case I try to OD on it, even though it is set so that it is almost impossible to do so. Dad asks me why I did it and I tell him to fuck right off. Mum cries even louder because of this and Dad has to calm her down before taking her home. I then drift off into another one of my dreams about the woman who was lost to me forever when she died.

It is Christmas Day and she has woken me up at five in the morning like an over-excited six year old. I roll over and stick my head beneath the pillows and tell her to go back to sleep. With this she promptly jumps upon me and pummels my back until I give in and stagger over to the bathroom for a shit, shower and shave. By the time I get out of the bathroom there is a breakfast of bacon, eggs, sausages, black pudding, beans and fried bread waiting for me on a tray upon the bed. I sit down beside her and she feeds me like a baby who is being weaned off his mother's milk. She cuts the food really small for me and I play along with the game. I go "Ma-ma" and she laughs out loud like a peel of church bells, the colour rushing to her cheeks as I have her in stitches upon the bed. The tray lands upon the floor and we end up making love like two rabbits on heat, and we don't get up again until lunch time.

We go over to her folks for Christmas Dinner and for the opening of presents, and we are greeting by her mother and the smell of freshly baked mince pies. Her Dad offers out sherry and port and I end up with a very generous double Jack Daniels in my hand. My woman joins her mother out in the kitchen as us men talk about work and golf before dinner is served. The evening goes well and we arrive back home after midnight. She falls asleep upon the sofa and I scoop her up into my arms and carry her upstairs to bed.

I am awoken by a nurse as she gives me my medication. I ask her how long I've been out of it and she tells me it is now Monday and I have been drifting in and out of torpor all weekend since my arrival on Friday. She also mentions that I have been calling out a woman's name in my sleep and she asks me about who I was dreaming of. I tell her it was nothing and that I always talk in my sleep. She doesn't pursue this any further and I watch her carrying on with her rounds before drifting off to sleep.

I dream of the day I first noticed that she was losing weight. Unknown to me she was unhappy with her body and had made herself sick after each meal she ate. If I had known I would have gone to my doctor immediately and got help for her. But she kept this from me and it wasn't until her first heart attack that I found out what she had been doing. I visited her every day in hospital after work and brought her flowers and books to read each time I came to see her. I brought her favourite books by the likes of Marion Zimmer Bradley and Jeanette Winterson, Elizabeth Nickson and Roberta Latow. She looked forward to my visits, and I tried to be strong for her even though I was going through my own inner turmoil. They had her on three square meals a day and within a fortnight she was released from hospital. She got counselling and everything was all right for a while. Then the depression hit her again and I could only watch as she slipped away from me for the last time.

I wake up to find one of the male orderlies standing beside my bed with a tray of food for me to eat. I am not hungry but I try to force something down me so that he would go away and leave me alone with my dreams of her face and of endless nights making love to her. But during my sleep the nurses had removed the Morphine Machine from my drip and I cannot sleep because of all those days I had already spent in a comatose state. There is a Gideon Bible on my bedside cabinet and I pick it up and start reading from it, but I can't make head or tale of it because it is the King James Version and it is all in Old English.

The passages are alien to me as I haven't been to church since my primary school days in the Eighties when such things were a part of the standard education policy in the UK. Those days you could still get a ruler rapped across your knuckles for misbehaviour, and for some reason I was always up at the front of the class with my hands red raw for some offence or other.

Finally I drift off to sleep and I dream of her funeral. Both of our parents were there looking dignified in their grief and I stood at the front of the church and told everyone how much I had loved her and some of those private things which we shared in our brief time together. The women were in tears and the men just sat there in grim determination not to show their emotions. I admired their stiff upper lips but still considered such things as folly. When they carried her coffin off for burial I cried and wailed for God to take me as she was laid down in the stone cold earth, and I had to be held back from throwing myself down into her grave before the gravediggers came and buried her in the rancid sod. I was carried away from her grave as the service ended and it was time to attend the wake at her parent's house. I spent the time draining whiskey after whiskey and telling everyone how much I was going to miss her.

Within six weeks from her funeral I had lost all will to live and was constantly taking days off work. The boss had to let me go and within six months the mortgage upon the house that she and I had brought was foreclosed and I ended up in a dirty bedsit in the back end of Boscombe where all the Scag Heads lived along side those who for some reason could never make anything of their lives. I had chosen to move to Dorset after I had lost her and the house because this is where my parents are living, and I wanted to be near them after the death of my wife. I rubbed shoulders with hookers and ex-cons at the DHSS on those days I had to hand in another sick note for the next six months. Often an irate customer would be escorted from the premises by a group of six burly police men because he had threatened the staff with physical violence. I lost the will to live and began shooting heroine in the vain hope that it would kill me. Then I started to mutilate my arms and now I am in this hospital bed after the latest attempt upon my own life.

The next morning an Asian doctor visits me while upon his rounds He talks about grief counselling and addiction therapy. I tell him to fuck off and mind his own business. He looks grimly at me and walks away from the end of my bed. One of the female nurses calls me a fool and I tell her exactly where to get off. She leaves the ward in floods of tears and I am moved into a single room at the end of the mixed ward so that my outbursts will no longer offend the other patients. This just puts me in another one of my "I can't be fucked cos I'm so depressed and I want to die" moods and I refuse to eat. I lose weight so I am put upon another drip just to keep me alive until they can decide what to do about me.

By the end of the week I am transferred to Saint Ann's Hospital and put upon the secure ward under a section one order. I finally go cold turkey after all the drugs that they put me upon at the Royal Bournemouth wear off and I am left without any drugs in a locked cell. I pace up and down as other inmates scream obscenities and gibber loudly in their drug-induced sleep. Their incessant moaning drive me up the wall and I end up banging upon the cell door to get them to shut the fuck up. Two orderlies come in and restrain me while a nurse gives me a shot to get me to be quiet and go to sleep.

I am put on sleep therapy for two weeks and then transferred to a section two ward, orange watch. I am escorted wherever I go by a male nurse and I am only allowed off the ward for fifteen minutes to buy fags and chocolate, or to go see one of the doctors from the Community Forensic Team for another session of drug therapy and grief counselling.

Six months later I am put upon a section three ward and allowed to enjoy the gardens which surround the hospital where I am interned. Some evenings a load of us would be escorted down to the beach by some of the nurses after tea and we'd paddle in the sea and collect seashells for OT the next morning. I am working upon a portrait of my former lover in wool and PVA glue on card, and my occupational therapist says that it is a bit morbid how thins she appears. I tell her how my wife died and she suggests that maybe I should spend some time with the anorexics and bulimics, as it would be good for the both of us. I say I'll think about it and get back to her later as I am not ready to face the cause of my wife's death in other people and I don't know how I would react to seeing another human skeleton. She says that's fine and that I am not to over stretch myself.

It is now a year later and I am doing okay. My Forensic Psychologist says that I am making a good recovery and that my time with the anorexics have helped me immensely in dealing with the cause of my grief. I think of her often, and I still wake up with my pillow soaked in my own tears, but at least I have found a reason to live once more. My parents are now visiting me each weekend and I am allowed to go out with them on Saturdays, for shopping trips in Poole or Bournemouth. I enjoy these trips out with them and I am feeling brighter in myself. I haven't seen my late wife's parents since I left Kent over a year ago, but they send me parcels containing tobacco and toiletries every so often. I have even met someone who doesn't remind me of my late wife, and she is a great source of light and love to me. Unfortunately she is upon a section two wing on orange watch, so I only get to see her during OT for an hour each morning, but we talk about everything and the doctors are happy for us to be seen together, and have even suggested that she is to be allowed to see me as often as she wishes so that we may support each other as much as possible. There is nothing sexual between us, as neither of us are ready for any kind of commitment other than to just be there for each other.

At the end of the month I move to sheltered accommodation in Bournemouth, but I will be visiting Saint Ann's at least twice a week for counselling and to see all the friends that I have made during my stay here. I am looking forward to the move, even though I am slightly scared by the prospect of living in the community again. But I have to rebuild my life once more, and the first thing I have to do is to learn to feed myself and keep a roof over my head. So tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my life, but I will never forget her until the day I die, and there shall always be a place in my heart for her until we are together again in heaven or wherever it is we go after this life has ended.