Must We Stop Dreaming of Them to Heal?

Snow closed the road down to the ferry.

Many people believe that healing after a death means letting go. The dreams of the person should come less often, the belief says, then fade out completely, and on the morning they stop you can call yourself well again. In this picture grief is a station you leave, and the dreams are the platform shrinking behind you.

It does not usually work like that, and it does not need to. Many people keep a bond with someone who has died for the rest of their lives. They talk to them in the car, wear their old coat, ask what they would have done, and dream of them now and then for years. People who study grief call this keeping of a connection "continuing bonds", and they have found that it is a normal part of grieving, not a sign that something has gone wrong. Healing does not cut the line. It changes the timetable.

The snow came in the middle of the winter, three days of it.

On the first morning I walked to the bakery at half past three through streets that nobody had touched yet. My boots made the only marks. The buses had stopped running, and the road down to the harbor was closed, so even the night ferry stayed tied up at the pier with its lights on, humming quietly to itself like a machine that had been told to wait. The ovens were warm when I arrived, and the baker said that on a morning like this people want bread more than ever.

When I came home at midday, my brother was still in his pajamas at the kitchen window. His school was shut for the snow.

My brother thought he had gone backwards.

He said he had not dreamed of our grandmother for more than a month, and he had begun to think that this meant he was getting better. Then last night she came.

In the dream she was in the workshop, holding a bicycle wheel up to the window and spinning it to see if it ran true. She did not say anything. She just watched the spokes blur and slow, and nodded, and handed the wheel to him.

"And I woke up and felt like I'd gone right back to the spring," he said. "Like I'd been on the train for months and somebody put me off at the first station again."

I made us both tea and sat down across from him. Outside, the snow was falling so straight and slow that it looked like the window itself was moving upward, a lift rising through a white building.

I told him he had not gone backwards, any more than I had at the bus stop in the first week of winter. A dream after a quiet spell is not a step back. Very often it is only the mind visiting someone it still loves, the way you might ride an old bus route on a free afternoon just to see the houses again.

A bond is not a rope that has to be cut.

He asked whether it was healthy to still talk to her. He did, he admitted, sometimes, in the workshop, when a screw would not come loose.

I said I did too. I tell her when the bread rises badly. I tell her which bus I caught.

I told him about a woman I serve at the bakery. Every Saturday she counts out her coins on the counter and buys two rye rolls with caraway seeds. One is for her, and one, she once told me, is the kind her husband always ate. He died years before I started working there. She eats the second roll on the bench outside the shop, slowly, watching the buses come and go. She does not look unwell or stuck. She looks like a person keeping an appointment she likes.

For a long time, many people thought that the work of grief was to detach yourself, to pull your feelings back from the person who died and invest them elsewhere, like money moved from one account to another. The newer view is gentler and, I think, more honest. Most people do not detach. They carry the person on, in a changed form. The relationship stops being a meeting in the kitchen and becomes something more like a radio station you can still tune to, faint at times and clear at others. Dreams are one of the places where that station comes in.

None of this means you must hold on in any particular way. Some people dream of the dead often and some almost never, and both are ordinary. What matters is whether the bond helps you live your day. If it does, there is nothing to cut.

My brother's friend has dreamed of her father for years.

In the afternoon the snow stopped for an hour, and my brother's friend came up the hill dragging a plastic sled behind her. She had walked across town because the buses were still not running and she was, she said, going slightly mad indoors. Her cheeks were red, and her scarf was wound so many times around her neck that she had to unwind it like a cable from a drum before she could speak properly.

My brother told her about his dream of the bicycle wheel and about feeling put back at the first station. She sat on the radiator to warm her hands and listened.

"I still dream about my dad," she said. "I was really small when he died. I don't even remember his voice from real life, only from videos. But he turns up. Not often. Once or twice a year, maybe."

I asked her, carefully, what the dreams were like now.

She said they had changed as she grew. When she was little, he carried her on his shoulders through a crowd. Later he taught her to ride a bike in a car park that does not exist. Last spring he sat in the back row at one of the band's concerts and clapped in the wrong places. "He's never in the dream for long," she said. "He's just there, doing dad things. I wake up and I'm a bit sad, and also not."

My brother asked whether she wanted the dreams to stop.

She looked at him as if he had asked whether she wanted the sun to stop coming up. "No," she said. "Why would I? It's the only place he gets to see what I'm doing."

Then she put her scarf back on, turn by turn, and the two of them went out to find a slope steep enough for the sled.

Tonight's Story

That night the power flickered twice and then held. We lit the old oil lamp from the workshop anyway, because it felt right, and I told my brother about Pearl.

Pearl is a poem written in Middle English, more than six hundred years ago, by a poet whose name nobody knows. It survives in a single old manuscript, bound together with three other poems, one of which is the famous tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It is made of a hundred and one stanzas of twelve lines each, and every stanza is linked to the next by a word or phrase that repeats, so the whole poem runs like a train of carriages coupled end to end.

The man who tells the poem calls himself a jeweler. He has lost a pearl. It slipped from his hand in a garden and fell through the grass into the earth, and he cannot find it. Most readers take the pearl to be his little daughter, who died before she was two years old. The poem never says so plainly. It lets the jewel stand for the child, the way a ticket in a drawer can stand for a whole journey.

In high summer he goes back to the garden, to the spot where the pearl was lost. Flowers and sweet herbs have grown over it. Grief overcomes him there, and he falls asleep on the little mound.

In his sleep, his spirit travels to a country he has never seen. There are cliffs of crystal and woods with leaves that shine like polished silver. Birds of bright colors sing in the trees. He walks beside a river whose bed is not mud but jewels, glowing in the water like stars on a winter night. He wants to cross it, because the land on the other side looks even brighter, but he cannot find a way.

Then, at the foot of a cliff on the far bank, he sees a young girl dressed in white and covered in pearls. He knows her at once. She was nearer to him, he says, than an aunt or a niece.

The father wanted to cross the river.

At first the dreamer is overjoyed. He calls to her across the water and asks if she is his pearl, the one he lost and has mourned ever since.

Her answer surprises him. She tells him, kindly but firmly, that he is mistaken. His pearl is not lost. What he lost was something like a rose that faded, as roses do. Now she is safe and well, in a place where nothing can be taken from her.

They talk for a long time, across the river. She tells him he has made three mistakes in a single breath. He believes she is there only because he can see her with his own eyes. He thinks he can now come and live with her in that country. And he thinks he can simply cross the water. He argues with her; she answers him with patience. She explains how she came to be so happy there, though she was so small when she died. In the end she lets him see, from the near bank, the shining city where she now lives, and a procession of people in white, and her among them.

And the father, seeing her there, loses his head with longing. He decides that he will cross the river whatever it costs. He runs to the bank and starts to plunge into the water.

At that moment he wakes up. He is lying in the garden, his head on the little mound where the pearl was lost.

The poem does not ask him to forget.

My brother was quiet when I stopped. Then he said, "So he loses her twice."

I said that was one way to read it. But I see it differently. The dreamer is not punished for dreaming of his daughter, and he is not told to stop loving her. The only thing he cannot do is cross the river while he is still alive. Everything else is allowed. He sees her, hears her voice, argues with her, and learns where she is. When he wakes, he does not throw the dream away. He keeps it, and he ends the poem calm, ready to go on with his life, with her still in it.

To me that is the oldest picture I know of a continuing bond. The river stays between them, and so does the conversation.

I told my brother one more thing, as plainly as I could. In many dreams that grieving people describe, the one who died seems calm and at ease, like the girl on the far bank. The poem cannot prove anything about where she really is, and it does not try to. What it shows is a father whose dream gave him back a little of what grief had taken: her face, her voice, and a reason to get up from the grass.

Something to Try Tonight

Write a short postcard to someone you miss. Keep it to the size of a real postcard, a few lines at most.

Tell them one plain thing from your day, the way you would if you were away on a journey and they were waiting at home. The snow is deep. I caught the early bus. The bread rose well this morning. You do not have to say anything large or brave.

Read it once, slowly, in a quiet voice. Then fold it and put it somewhere safe, a box or a drawer, where other cards can join it over time. Turn off the light and breathe out longer than you breathe in, a few times, like a ferry slowing as it comes in to the pier.

If a dream comes, let it come. If none comes, the card still went where it was going.

The clock repairer was clearing snow at midnight.

Before bed I looked out of the front window. The streetlamps made small round rooms of light in the snow. Across the street the clock repairer was out with a shovel, clearing the path to his shop. Then he crossed over and cleared ours too, slowly, without being asked.

I went down in my coat to thank him. He leaned on the shovel and looked at our dark workshop window. He said he still talked to my grandmother when a repair would not come right. "I ask her about the escapement," he said, "out loud. The bench doesn't mind." He said it as plainly as a man telling you the time.

My brother had come to the door behind me. When the repairer had gone back across the road, he asked me whether I ever dreamed of her clearly, the way he did.

I told him not yet, not properly, only in pieces. I did not know then that a few weeks later she would come to me in the workshop with a clock in her hands, and that I would write that night down as the next chapter of this year.

We stood at the door a while longer. The snow went on falling on the bus shelter, on the hives next door, on the two fresh paths that met in the middle of the road.