Better off dead

Since my recent posts have been pretty relentlessly cheerful, I thought I'd go for a change of pace.

I had a rather horrifying nightmare the other night. I think I was at a wedding. There was something vaguely doglike around, and people were acting like it was a dog, but I knew it wasn't. It reminded me that robot dog from the original Battlestar Galactica, but smaller and somehow monstrous. I saw that my recently deceased uncle Dave was the owner of the dog and I looked at him and said, "Uncle Dave...but aren't you...dead?"

Then he started decomposing, and I remember thinking that his skin was like runny cheese. It was kind of creepy at the time, but I went back to sleep. When I mentioned it to Jen the next day, there was that sense of distance that comes with morning, but that creepy feeling crept back to me as I described it to her.

Lily had a nightmare the other night too. She wouldn't say what it was. I usually ask, but Jen just wants to get her off the subject. Lily commented that the dreamcatcher near her bed didn't catch the bad dreams, and Jen made what I thought was a good save, observing that Lily had taken off some of the feathers and that's probably why it wasn't working.

Lily usually spends Fridays with her great-grandmother on Jen's side. Lily is getting very conscious about Great Nanny's age and the infirmities that accompany it. Lily has occasionally said "I never want to get old!", which reminded me of a Woody Allen line, "It is a sad fact that 50 percent of marriages in this country end in divorce. But, hey, the other half end in death. You could be one of the lucky ones!"

I was thinking of that when she came right out and said "I want to die before I get old."

I'm not sure she what she thinks death is ("The undiscovered country, from whose bourn, No traveller returns"), and I'm reluctant to bring up the topic because it does tend to be traumatic for her. She talked about her hamster getting better and I told her (gently) that dead is forever, but I don't think she accepted that.

Heck, I don't know if I've accepted it yet.