Grief

I have dream conversations with the dead.  This afternoon as I slept, it was with Joe, now dead for eight years.  It was as real as if he had been sitting across the table from me, dominoes in play.  

Sometimes the conversations go back more than thirty years to my father, drinking Seagrams Seven disguised in a carton of milk.  

The dreams are always pleasant and exciting while I sleep and then unsettling when I wake up; they wake me up.

"For man also knoweth not his time; as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in a snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them."

Joe talking to me with an accent and grammar, now nearly extinct, that was once on both sides of Red River, with an understanding of a hard scrabble life I never had to experience.  

The grief by a mother who had lost a son as described by the preacher:  "But her hope drew a veil before her sorrow, and though her grief was great enough to swallow her up, yet her love was greater and did swallow up her grief."

And as the doctor, the cracked archangel, says, "...the long habit of living indisposith us for dying.