In 1986 I was a kindergartner in North Miami Beach.
I dreamt that my mom was late picking me up from school and I was left alone on the playground. Noticing some movement in the tall grass at the edge of the playground, I saw a lion weaving in and out and decided to explore that area.
I wandered in the grass, and soon heard two voices screaming for help. I followed the voices until I got to a clearing. In the middle of the clearing was a fountain, like a large cement birdbath. The screaming was coming from inside the fountain. As I approached it, I saw with horror that inside the fountain was my teacher’s head and my mom’s head, decapitated, each cut in half and sewn back together forming one. They both looked at me with one eye and screamed at me to separate them. I felt such pity and horror but I knew that if I separated them, they’d both die.
I woke up crying and upset, naturally and went into my parents room, at which time my dad told me that I could learn how to control my dreams. He gave me the instructions to “find my hands.” He gave me a rudimentary lesson in lucid dreaming that I would develop throughout my life, first lucidly dreaming around 7 and developing from there.
In the meantime, I pondered the meaning of the dream, always mystified by the lion and fountain which seem like such strong, symbolic images. I loosely translated it as being torn between my mother and the outside world, represented by Mrs. Cohen, my schoolteacher.
In October 2001 I was 20. I was living in a dorm room at Stern College in NYC and my mom had also moved back from Zion, Illinois to her native NYC very recently, leaving most of her kids there. Only my youngest sister was living with her at the time.
My mom and sister weren’t getting along. My 12 year old sister called me frequently, telling me the problems they were having that mostly stemmed from my mom’s inability to find a job and sleeping all the time. My sister had little confidence in my mom’s abilities to care for her.
I had found them a therapist and was doing all I could, assuming it was normal stuff: relational, emotional, and economic problems, until one night while my sister was complaining, I heard my mom in the background clearly slurring with an odd tone in her voice.
I told my sister to put her on the phone and when I heard her voice, I intuited that my mom had a brain tumor and was going to die. I smoked a cigarette out of my dorm room window, realizing that my next step was getting her to the hospital.
When I got to my mom’s apartment, the door was open, and there were papers strewn on the floor. I walked in and sat on her futon, fending off the cat’s attacks, anxiously wondering where my mom was.
She stumbled in the door soon missing a shoe. I called a car service and took her to the emergency room. She had no insurance at the time but would be set up with Medicaid.
She was very dazed in the ER. The clearest memory I have is of her reading French hospital signs and slipping into French. She had studied French in college.
By the time she was seen, they didn’t want to keep her. I think they thought she was “just” on drugs, or “just” mentally ill, but my friend Izzy was able to convince them to keep her. They left her in what I can only call a cell, sleeping on the cold floor with no furniture.
Despite my initial intuitive blast, I was left with the assumption that my mom was having some kind of serious mental breakdown for a day or two. Then one day at work I got a message to call a doctor at the hospital.
A doctor there had ordered a CT scan that found a large tumor in her brain requiring immediate surgery. The extraction biopsy would tell us the nature of the cancer.
It was Chanukah when I came to visit my mom in the hospital post-op. When I first saw her, I gasped because the dramatic scar on her shaved head looked so familiar, the way the stitching had appeared years ago in the dream.
The doctor broke the news to me that she had an aggressive stage 4 glioblastoma multiforme that would likely kill her soon. It could be as early as a couple months away.
One day while my mom was in the hospital, I had a dream where the chime of an email arriving sounded from the basement of the house where I was living in Queens.
I went down to the basement where I found a Rainbow Gathering! A lucid dreamer, I figured that since life was so stressful, I had created something to give me a sense of peace and calm, and I enjoyed the dream.
When I woke up, I figured that I might as well check my email.
In my inbox there was an invitation to a Rainbow Gathering in Emilia, Italy, which happens to be my name. I felt shaken by such a personal invitation given the dream I’d just had.
I went to the Rainbow Gathering, which made my mother really proud. I had taken her to her first Rainbow Gathering the previous summer where she’d had the best time of her life; so good that she’d suggested to me that her brain tumor may have been caused by the shocking difference between the depression she’d lived with in her home life, back in Zion, Illinois, and the bliss she’d experienced at the rainbow gathering.
She stayed alive through the summer but not much longer. On June 20th, my 21st birthday, I was approached about signing a DNR by the hospital. I happened to have just turned the exact age required to legally sign the form.
She died on September 8th 2002, more importantly on the second day of Rosh Hashana.
I got married in August 2012 and was pregnant within two years, at which time I experienced grief about my mother not being there for my pregnancy.
My mother had birthed 6 kids, the last 2 at home, and always said she loved being pregnant and giving birth. I on the other hand, hated being pregnant, hated being poked and prodded. I wished I could talk to my mom about it all.
I wrote a song about it called “Come in to the Light” which was a call for my mother’s presence to surface and watch and guide me through the pregnancy.
I enlisted a brilliant artist to make a video to accompany the song and I talked to her about my dream imagery. She asked me for a photo of my mother, and she surprised me by flashing my mother’s bright smile at the end of it.
In the last trimester of my pregnancy I was looking for work and a friend of a friend (on social media) put out a call for a temp worker, signing synagogue members up for their high holiday tickets. The synagogue happened to be my mom’s favorite synagogue B’nai Jeshurun in the Upper West Side. When I went for work, I discovered that on the same block as the synagogue were 2 carvings on either side of an apartment building with actual fountains where the water came out of a lion’s mouth into fountain below.
I stared at this, utterly disbelieving what I was seeing. I wondered if I had ever visited NYC with my mom when I was very young, been to the synagogue with her and seen the lion and fountain which might have explained their presence in my dream. My dad told me that I had never been to New York with my mom. I felt as if the present was affecting the past. I took this picture on my last day of work.
I left that job the day before my due date, (Labor Day!) but didn’t give birth until 10 days after that, which happened to be the anniversary (yartzeit) of my mother’s death (the 2nd day of Rosh Hashana). I had a hard time in labor, mostly due to the bullying and dehumanization of the mechanized, medicalized birth industry, and the particular hospital and practice that I gave birth at.
I didn’t want to use pain medicine, as my mom hadn’t used it. But the hospital wasn’t accustomed to non medicated women, and my request to not be hooked up to a monitor the whole time resulted in combative standoffs that reduced my ability to handle the pain and I finally asked for the epidural.
But when the anesthesiologist began her monologue about the procedure and risks, I politely as possible asked her to stop talking immediately, I had no tolerance for any voices. She left the room and didn’t come back. I was able to get through the transition phase of labor because at one point my husband whispered in my ear Your mom would be so proud of you. That triggered the image from the end of my video that the artist had snuck in, of my mom’s radiant face to pop into my mind and remain there, fixed, as a focal point.
The video for Come Into the Light: https://youtu.be/WN_ITpDmJKE?t=263
UPDATE: In 2020, (my son, now almost 6 years old) I learned my doula has the same birthday as my mom (8/28). That same doula, super “randomly” had worked in the same position as me at the synagogue the year before.
Update 2: As a note, I put the wrong date on my mom’s tombstone, I put 8/19.
My son went to a school called Beit Rabban from the age of 4. When he was 6 (shortly after my last update) his dad and I started on a pretty unbelievably ugly divorce that took over 3 years. In a particularly difficult moment, I asked my mom for help. Shortly after that, my son’s school notified us that they are moving to Benei Jeshurun!
That year my son’s dad decided he wanted to move him to another school, farther away from me. I didn’t agree that the move was appropriate and hoped that the fact that the connection to my mom (through my son’s school being in the process of moving to Benei Jeshurun) would provide some help. Fortunately my son stayed an extra year and was able to go to a year of school in my mom’s favorite synagogue where I had worked until my due date.
The next year it was decided by the school that he needed to move, and there was a lot of conflict about that, especially since we were still in the middle of the contentious divorce. We had an especially difficult summer, arguing about what should happen, that culminated in our son getting accepted into what I believed to be the best school for him which happened on August 19, the date that I had mistakenly put on my mom’s tombstone. By messing up the birth date from August 28 (the birthday of my doula) to Aug 19, I had transitioned my mom from Virgo to Leo.
UPDATE 3: I read this to my son and he wants you to know that he has a friend at each of his schools named Leo.
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