Dreams My Mother Taught Me

On my thirty-eighth birthday, my mother, Margaret, died, crossing over with her now adult children at her bedside. Even now, years on, whenever I see mothers and daughters conversing intimately, my heart quietly grieves. Whoever first said, "We're born alone, and we die alone" misses the point - the woman who bore you knows that she was with you on the day you were born!

After my mother's death, I felt both bereft and fortunate to have been with her in the months before she died of cancer. Her death felt doubly hard because I had lived abroad for many years. When I left the United States for Europe at twenty-five, she cried, "You will never come back!" Her words proved prophetic, for although I returned home often for visits, I settled in England.

If you have loved and lost your mother, you will have a sense of grief personal to you, one that resurfaces when you suddenly have the urge to talk with her or give her a hug.

Like me, you may wish you had got on better with your mother and had known her more as a person in her own right. It can be all the harder to accept the loss if she has left without saying "I love you", or without your having the chance to say the same. There may not have been time to ask for mutual forgiveness and understanding, leaving you both with many unanswered "Whys?".

Whether or not your mother has passed to the "other side", I present you, the reader, with a hope - that love continues beyond the grave. Even when the human relationship has been fraught, the departed soul, free from the adversities of life, will so often seek to love and make amends.

I share here the story of how my relationship with my mother deepened after her death as she initiated me into lucid dreaming.

Some readers might say my visions of my mother are nothing more than a projection of my dreaming mind. Others might argue that from beyond the veil she truly appeared. But I sense both are true. Either way, I hope that my own experience will speak to you in a personal way and that my sharing these dreams my mother taught me may reassure you that love never dies.