Shadowy Dreams of the Sunset

 ”Wispy dreams that come in the night are vaporous shadows that follow in the daylight.”

This dream has lurked in my memory for twenty plus years and with my husband’s diagnosis of cancer, it became my reality. The dream stopped being elusive when the doctor repeatedly said, ” I am sorry. I am sorry. I am so so sorry”.  The doctor was expressing his regret when he informed my husband of the diagnosis. Cancer. Finally,  I understood this dream.

The moment wasn’t an epiphany, or an “aha”, it was a moment of “knowing”. It was knowing something was tangible, a reality that it is yet to be. This knowing was as real to me as knowing my name or that I have a son. In that moment, this vapor of a dream changed from wisp to weight. 

This dream was the beginning of my relationship with my husband. It was the second stage to a romance that was begun 20 years before. In the years before he physically walked in the door of my work, he came to me in the dream. I always knew that it was a warning. A warning that he would be leaving me.  It foretold my future with him.

I’ve tried to write about this dream many times and, each time, I could not encapsulate the imagery in this black and white reality. It was like trying to catch a moonbeam or a bit of starlight, a mystery,a vapor. This vapor, this wisp of smoke was foreshadowing  the sunset of days.  Unless powerful prayers impact the Heart of God, this cancer is the sunset in which he walks; he is leaving and I cannot follow, at least not now….

It reveals the desperate soul of my husband and it speaks of his deepest desire. It exposes his futility and my naked, bare love for him. It also foretells the price that I will pay for this love. Unless the power of prayer alters the outcome, for this love, I will be left destitute in all ways, emotionally, spiritually and financially.

If I had this warning, why did I choose to enter into his life or allow him to enter into mine? My heart would let me do nothing less than love him.

In the midst of all of this pain, I have been blessed. I know of many who live a lifetime and  never loved or known love like this, but I was given a second chance. I took it. 

Once, I asked my husband if it was better to love or to be loved? I think most would answer that it is better to be loved. I have known love from others.  I did not return their love and I would have been a parasite to accept them for loving me. I could not lover return their. But, with this man, this time around, I wanted to love. I wanted to give totally, 100 percent, to love with total abandonment. He is and always will be the only man that I can love like that…. When he came back in to my life, how could I turn away? I couldn’t. So, knowing the end from the beginning, I entered this love with a choice. Even if he didn’t love me as much as I loved him, I chose to love him and be satisfied.  I chose this in spite of this warning. This is my dream.

The Sunset Dream

I am observing a man and a woman inside a glass dome like structure. A dome is the best and only way that I can describe this enclosure because it was unlike any thing with which I was familiar. In this dream, I was  observing what transpired with in the dome from a higher position, as if from a tree… 

In the dome, the man ( my future husband) was desperately pleading with a woman without a face. Even without a face, I could see that she was very upset and angry with him.  He, on the other hand, was on his knees, begging and pleading with her to love him. Standing with her back to him and refusing to face him, he continued to declare his love. The intensity of his pain and desparation was palatable.

In exasperation, he got up from his knees and looked up at me. When he realized it was me, he looked relieved and he started toward me and he hurriedly came outside of this dome. By the look on his face, I had hope that he had realized that I loved him and it was me who truly loved him. With these realizations, I believed that he was leaving this faceless woman and making his way to me.

As he approached me, I was hoping to hear him him to say that he realized that he loved me; instead, he asked me for $100.00. A hundred dollars was all that I had in the world and I remembered thinking that if I surrendered it, ithis act of selflessness would show him the depth of my love for him.  It was my total value, my worth, it was everything that I was. With joy in my heart, I gave all that I had to him.

Much to my surprise, he took the money from me and I watched him re enter the dome. Once he was inside the dome, he offered my worth to the angry faceless woman. My heart was shattered into a million tiny pieces. I felt as though I was scattered to the four winds. Each tiny piece of me was lying alone without hope or value.

I continued to watch him go down on his knees, once again, pleading for her to take my gift as a symbol of his love. He emptied himself of  what was mine and gave it to someone who was so undeserving of his love and my worth.

In the next moment, the woman turned and walked away from him and left the dome. He followed her with his arms outstretched begging her to take everything. I was being sacrificed so that he could love her completely, yet his love was given without it being wanted or returned. I continued to hope that he would somehow realize that all of this was futile and that she was not going to love him. Instead, I watched him continue this sad dance of love as they began to walk downward on a rough and rocky path.  

I followed them. As the day began to slip away, I noticed that the path was leading into the sunset. The last rays of the light were slipping under this horizon to where I could not follow them any longer. They were walking further into the sunset.  I stood there watching them grow smaller and smaller to the point that they almost disapeared from view. 

I stood there watching my hope of being loved by him fading into the glooming and I could no longer watch. With my heart broken and feeling a great emptiness I had to turn from this sunset and go back from where I had been….he was forever gone.

I woke up.

Now, I realize that we are at the sunset of his life. It isn’t a faceless woman with whom he is leaving. It is the face of Cancer with which he walks. How can I compete with this disease? I know that it isn’t cancer that he loves. It was the woman before me who he wanted. He chose to love an impossibility. It was her mental illness that was a glass dome. Bi polar disorder prevented her from loving anyone.

What he received in spite of his love was anger, bitterness and failure. All of these became the cornerstone for his cancer. (I have medical research articles that substantiate this theory. The article states that cancer co relates to people who have terrible emotional shocks or wounds.)

When my husband returned to me, he was badly wounded. He was so angry and full of hatred for women I was afraid that he would hurt me or any woman until they were as full of pain, anger and bitterness as he was. Yet, I willing gave all I that had in every way to him. I loved him. I always loved him.

Regardless of his prayers for forgiveness and his changing heart( Love truly a heart; not only my love. He came to know God’s love and that changes every mans heart.) No matter with all of the changes, the cancer refuses to stop growing. Cancer continues to fill every physical void that is in his body with its mutinous poison. Just like the bitterness in a heart, cancer consumes a body.

He has done all that he knows to do. Both, spiritually and emotionally, there is nothing more to do. There are no more apologies to be made. There are no more sins of which to repent. He has done all that he can do and yet, the cancer grows.

I just stand here, watching him wrestle with this monster and I am helpless because I have given all that I am and all that I have….The sunset beckons and I can not follow him.

Because of the dream, I know that prayer and a miracle are the only things that can divert his path. It is inevitable. As I did in the dream, I will to stand as if to keep watch. 

Scripture says “After you do all that you can, then you stand.” (my paraphrase). I am still standing. I haven’t turned away; I can’t.

I believe that God gives us dreams and they can foretell what will be. I also believe that prayer can alter these events should it be God’s perfect will. It is in the prayers that Hope lives. That is why I must pray. But, like Jesus prayed in surrender to His Father, I too must say, “Not my will, but Yours be done.”