Acre Under a Green Sky

It was not a vision. It was a dream.

I was living in New York City, and my acre under a green sky was no longer a cave of green on my grandfather's farm, but my work as a writer. It was a perfect distraction from life and the living of it.

In the dream, my mother appeared against a background of nothingness –– not in a room or in a field of daisies or among the clouds. She simply appeared out of nothingness –– vivid and three-dimensional –– as real as can be. I saw her from head to toe looking much as she did when I last saw her except that she was happy. She was divinely happy. She was free. She was beautiful. She glowed with a peace and serenity I have never seen in another human being.

Then she said:

"Everything's going to be all right."

And I sat bolt upright in my bed wide awake, as if I hadn't been asleep at all. I had never been so awake. And I knew that my mother and I had finished our business together. Everything between us had been resolved in that instant. A weight I wasn't even conscious of carrying was lifted. I was free, too. And it seemed to me then; and still does, that she was imparting the wisdom of the ages in that simplistic line mothers have been cooing to their children since the beginning of time:

"Everything's going to be all right."

The next morning I wrote about the dream in my journal making a note of the date and time. I told some friends about it. Could it really have been my mother appearing to me in a dream?

No, they said it was a trick of the mind and it probably was. No more than a dream –– a wish. I was providing myself with something I needed at that moment. I agreed with them. I'm sure they were right. But how wonderful of me to give me that gift! I was so grateful to my mind for that magical contrivance.

Two years later, I was unlocking the three locks of my apartment door when the phone started ringing inside the apartment. I finished fumbling with the locks and just made it to the phone. It was someone from the National Westminster Bank in London wanting to locate my mother. It had something to do with the estate of her aunt, Bertha. I told the man that I had no idea where she was, but that she had moved to Los Angeles many years ago and probably never left. I told him that I thought she was probably dead; that none of my efforts to find her had ever panned out, but that it had been some time since I tried. I asked him to let me know if he learned anything and he said that he would. I hung up never expecting to hear from him again.

A month or so later, he called back. I was right. She was dead. He would send a copy of her death certificate. When it arrived, I noted that the underlying cause of death was alcoholism. Then almost as an afterthought, I checked the date of her death against the journal entry of the dream. I had had the dream six days before she died. I phoned the doctor in Los Angeles who had signed the death certificate. He didn't know anything offhand, but he would check the records and get back to me. Surprisingly, he did.

My mother collapsed on the street and was hospitalized. I had my dream the night she lapsed into a coma six days before she died.