Lately my dreams have been extremely strange. I suppose I could blame an overabundance of sugar or going to bed too late in the night. However, it seems to me that there is something astrologically going on here. While the dreams are odd ones, they include so many of the people in my life that I have been missing. Most recently, I had a dream that reminded me of denial and the stages of grief.

When people talk about the different stages of grief they seem to talk about denial as if it is the stage that comes first and goes away quickly. As with all the stages of grief, there is actually no real order and the denial comes in just the same as the rest. That is to say that it comes and goes. There are days now where I wake up and still don’t believe that Kody is gone.

My most recent dream about Kody included him messaging me suddenly. He told me that he had in fact faked his death successfully, but was almost ready to return. I didn’t believe it was him messaging me at first, so I asked him questions that only Kody would know the answer to. There was no real resolution in the dream, but he answered each question correctly.

I woke up and briefly entertained the idea that Kody could still be alive. He always talked about wanting to disappear, wanting to go off in the woods and never return. Most obviously this is what he was indeed able to do in the end, minus the completely disappearing part. I imagined for a moment, that he was taking a break from the world and would at one point return after all. This is that denial stage of grief, making a reappearance.

Denial and the stages of grief don’t just appear once and then resolve, they return again and again. This is how it is with grief. We aren’t working our way through stages, checking them off of our list and going on to the next. Each stage returns again and again to challenge us in a new way. It makes me wonder. Will there ever be a time where I am not grieving Kody? Will there ever be a time when I am not missing him? Is healing from loss possible? Many questions. No answers.