I had this dream last week. Matt had gotten up early to go mow his grandparents’ lawn. He kissed me goodbye and when the door shut behind him I drifted back to sleep for half an hour until my alarm went off. I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular as I closed my eyes, but I was thrown into the dream’s vividness immediately.

Like most dreams, the setting was irrational – I was in a hospital that looked like a nail salon, nurses bent over patients’ feet, administering manicures instead of IVs. I tell them I am here to pick up my mother’s belongings, she has died, can you help me?

They ignore me completely and I grow visibly upset. I see a doorway and walk to it defiantly; I don’t care if I’m not allowed in there, I will figure it out for myself.

And then I am in a bedroom, and a girl I knew from my childhood is there, someone I haven’t seen or talked to in years. I am crying and she tells me to stop, no one cares anymore what you’ve lost, you need to move on. She leaves the room.

I see my mother’s belongings shoved underneath a desk. An evening gown and black satin heels, a curling iron, a makeup bag, a tube of lipstick. I shove them into one of those plastic hospital bags with her name written on it in Sharpee.

I turn with the bag and my face wet with tears and I’m surprised to see there is someone sitting on the end of the bed, an elderly man with a white beard and overalls and a flannel shirt. I’ve never seen him before in my life, but he looks like Santa Claus dressed as a farmer. I want to feel repulsed by this stranger that has wandered in unbeknownst to me and witnessed my private grief, but he holds his arms out and says softly, it’s okay to cry. I sit down next to him and he embraces me, all large, protective arms, and scruffy beard and wide chest. It’s okay that you’ve lost her and miss her and don’t know what to do. Don’t listen to them. Don’t feel ignored. It’s okay to cry.

My alarm goes off and I wake up, surprised to feel my face wet with salty, hot, real tears.

I go through the motions of getting ready for work, all the while totally confused by my dream. Why a Santa Claus figure? Why a nail salon and a bag of belongings that weren’t really hers and harsh words from a girl that I haven’t talked to in a decade?

And also,

I didn’t think I needed permission to grieve.

But do I? Is that what the dream is telling me?

My independent, eldest child/only girl spirit doesn’t want to accept that answer. And she doesn’t want help, either. She doesn’t believe in Santa Claus, though he’s a nice idea.

But instead of letting my own subconscious irk my independence, I took the dream’s meaning at face-value, and let myself feel the unquenchable sadness of seven months and 23 days (and one year) sink into that hallow corner of my heart. I stayed quiet for a few days, asking myself things like, am I really going to write another sad blog again? And also, can I quit the internet? Because lately it seems plagued with politics and controversy and incessant arguing and it makes me tired.

I didn’t quit the internet, you’ll be happy to know. And this isn’t intended to be another sad blog, another reminder to each of you that this year I lost my mother, a pity party , or ploy for attention.

Instead, I’m here just to ask a question :

When you’re a twenty-something and you’re supposed to figure out your life and learn how not to be a student or a child or a follower anymore, how and when and where is permission relevant to us?

Because I realized that I have unintentionally been waiting for it – in my work, in my writing, in my grief, in my faith, in my own politics.

Do I need permission? How do I give it to myself? How do I let others give it to me appropriately, without depending on it to the point where I am immobile without it? How do I help someone else understand that they have permission to be who they are, emotions and words and tears and all? If you’re older than twenty-something, at what point did you learn to give yourself that grace and permission? Or, who helped you understand it?

Because the truth, as deeply painful as it is to admit this to you, is this :

I am afraid that if I admit that I need help I will give away my dignity.

[Image.]

She would be 51 today.

This time a year ago, we were celebrating the miracle of her 50th birthday. And I knew then that time was slipping through our fingers. I knew then that it was a matter of mere months. I knew then that today would not hold candles and cake and well wishes, at least not by her side.

Call it faithless. Call it hopeless. Call it weakness.

That is what it felt like then.

But today, 365 days later, it feels like a sort of acceptance, a strength that I both resent and depend on every day. And I’ve come to recognize it as being human. To accept the inevitable and make the most of what you have in the moment is the only real way to live. She taught me that, by the way she lived and by the way she died. That is something worth celebrating. And worth crying over, which will probably happen at some point today whether I want it to or not.

Happy Birthday, Mommy. I love you so.

Somewhere around mile marker 43, my heart and the road finally meet. Slow, numb tears fall, expelling breath in relief, sticking to my cheeks, pooling at the cleft in my collarbone.

I look at the clouds. They float softly alongside me, great and quiet companions of grief thrown in high relief by the setting sun we leave behind us. They gather rain but don’t know how to release it.

And it is no particular thing; today is not an anniversary, nor a first, nor a last.

It is everything and nothing all the same. It is the world, which unfurls, vaults and slowly spreads itself to the thin horizon of a flat Wisconsin plain, wheat waving in the dry heat. Another day is ending.

[Photo.]

Somewhere around mile marker 43, my heart and the road finally meet. Slow, numb tears fall, expelling breath in relief, sticking to my cheeks, pooling at the cleft in my collarbone.

I look at the clouds. They float softly alongside me, great and quiet companions of grief thrown in high relief by the setting sun we leave behind us. They gather rain but don’t know how to release it.

And it is no particular thing; today is not an anniversary, nor a first, nor a last.

It is everything and nothing all the same. It is the world, which unfurls, vaults and slowly spreads itself to the thin horizon of a flat Wisconsin plain, wheat waving in the dry heat. Another day is ending.

[Photo.]

Kerouac’s On the Road is a crazy trip of people and places and substances and Sal Paradise drinking it in like he’s been thirsty all his life, but there are these paragraphs where you can feel Kerouac sink into a rhythm of writing and you feel real, honest longing. Poetry pours out of him and it feels like time and madness have stopped for a brief moment, and then you’re off and running again, to the next town and party and the madness of the road goes on. I have a feeling that whichever book I choose next, I’ll still long for the crazy whirl that is Kerouac The Poet…

These are my favorite passages :

“Trains howl away across the valley. The sun goes down long and red. All the magic names of the valley unrolled – Manteca, Madera, all the rest. Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.”

…

“I wished I was on her bus. A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.”

…

“What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? – it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”

[Image.]