Cecilia was one of the first friends I made on my own when I moved here.
I met her at a local bagel shop where she worked. After a few days, I got up the nerve to ask her out. She already had plans to marry. This news was a bit of a disappointment, but at the same time, I knew her, and that was just fine with me.
I had not really known her long when she invited me to her wedding. The night before the wedding, I had a dream that I had gotten to Napa a bit early and had gone into a cafe near the church to kill some time. She came in, and sat across from me. We had coffee, and talked about the wedding. She started crying because as she told me, her time here was to be so short. Then, I figured she just meant that she had to go get dressed for the ceremony.
The next day when I arrived in Napa, I saw a couple of restaurants in sight of the church. I am not sure I found the one that might have matched the dream, but I thought about that dream as I sipped a cup of coffee waiting until it was time to go to the wedding. Unlike the dream, Cecilia did not come in to visit with me. I am sure she had other things to worry about.
In the receiving line after the ceremony, she introduced me to her friends as her soul mate, or the one she would have had one last fling with before getting married, or the one she would have married if she had not met her husband first. I am not sure I would have been satisfied to be just a last fling.
This is getting way too sad to write about now. Even after more than 30 years.
Cecilia and her husband were building a life together. Part of it included me, for a while. I helped them put in their kiwi orchard. They invited me to dinners on many special occasions, and sometimes just because I was a friend. We went to Halloween celebrations downtown when it was still just a local party. We went tubing and on bike rides. We watched football. We talked.
She was beyond happy when I had found someone who she could tell, made me happy. She did not know my entire story, but she knew that I had been hurt by things in my past, and she could see that I was truly happy now. But now that I was in a new relationship, we went through a time we did not see each other as frequently as before.
Cecilia was teaching horse riding, and trying to finish school so she could become a veterinarian. And she had a part-time job at a local tack and western wear shop. Judy and I ran into her near that shop downtown one afternoon. Cecilia told us she planned to get together with us soon, just in case something happened and we never saw each other again. As it turned out, we never did see her again.
Cecilia was killed by a drunk driver a short time later. Up to that point, I had never bothered with my seat belts in any vehicle I was in. That changed after what happened to Cecilia. She had been transporting two students home after a horse riding lesson and had made sure they both had their seat belts fastened. A vehicle driven by a drunk driver went into her car, head-on. She had not bothered to secure her own seat belt, even though it was a rule with her that her passengers were belted in. There is no guarantee that she would have made it if she had worn her seat belt, but she would have at least had a chance. Her two passengers got out with only minor cuts and bruises.
Thinking about the dream, and her feeling that something might happen before we saw each other again, well, what can I say? Sometimes life is very sad. And sometimes it almost seems that we know in advance that certain things might happen. Like my feeling that I had to get past that car going to Big Bear. Now the dream about Cecilia’s time here being short, and her own feeling that something might happen before we saw her again. Like so many other things.
Hello Cecilia. I will always remember you.
I have very odd dreams at times. After Cecilia died, I had a few dreams that involved her. I would dream I was visiting her house. Her husband would be there, but not Cecilia. I had no sense in those dreams that she had died. She just was not around.
Then, one time she interrupted a dream I had been having of my days back in college. I was about to leave Mulford Hall, the main Forestry building at U.C. Berkeley, and there she was walking towards me, coming up the stairs, opening the main doors as I was headed out. I did a double-take in the dream. Suddenly I was very aware of things; where I was, who she was. None of it jived in my head, since I knew two things. If I was really in Berkeley, she should not be there because I did not know her back then. And the big kicker; that I knew she had died.
Sometimes things in dreams do not jive, and you just go on knowing that it is only a dream, if you even know that. This time, it occurred to me that this must be a dream. When I realized that, the building, the outside world- it all faded into nothingness. But, Cecilia was still there and still coming towards me.
There I was, stammering, ‘why are you here, how are you here, are you really here?’ She came up face to face with me, grabbed my arms just below my shoulders, and said forcefully, ‘I want you to know that am OK. There is something I have wanted to do for you.’ And then, without saying anything else that I remember anyway, she pulled me towards her. We were already about as close as we could be, but she pulled me closer, and then we merged together. What followed was warmth, tingling, swirling flashes of light, a feeling of floating, of being- me, of being her, of being us together. Then it was over.
Whether there is anything to the belief some have in an afterlife, who knows? If there is no afterlife, then this was just a very beautiful dream about a deceased friend. If there is an afterlife, maybe she really came to me to tell me things were OK. One thing though, before this I had been having trouble dealing with her loss. And dealing with her loss became easier after this experience, dream or otherwise. I have had no further dreams of her of any kind.
Assuming there is no afterlife, maybe the way this works is that at some point, your subconscious mind literally merges the known memories and feelings for a deceased person into your own mind. Maybe this dream was a representation of that merger. I can accept that from a scientific viewpoint. But part of me still wants to believe that it was really Cecilia who visited me that night.
And that she is OK.
Memory is the Key 