Last night I dreamed of my father. So, in that light, I also dreamed about my mother, even though she was not present.
I dreamed we lived in a larger house beside a magnificent graveyard that butted against a cliff beside the ocean, where a crumbling cobble wall kept the visitors from their deaths and the graveyard contained. Yet this wasn’t any graveyard, but a place where each plot was carefully maintained, like miniature gardens, and every 4/9 plot had a different motif.
One had tiny terra cotta tiles on a roof of a miniature house, complete with bonsai spruce and foxglove flowers. Another had a single wisteria tree. Still others had the more traditional look, with an upright stone and a flat stone covering the entirety, as if the coffin weren’t buried underground but flush with the surface. Still others, as if a full community were buried at the edge of the graveyard, contained stilted Taiwanese temples that sent myriad spires to the sky. Still others were smaller still, with only a 2x4 plot comprising buried ashes, or simply a signifier of the person’s death, where lush, colorful gardens grew.
I believe the family took care of the graveyard, though I can’t be sure. I never saw anyone do work in it.
Somehow this graveyard was enchanted, and when a rumor got out there was something more going on, a group of people came in, with the proper paperwork, and started hunting out what was happening. At first they sought relics, as though someone had placed something of severe importance. Second, they hunted precious metals with detectors and special flashlights, and although they found many graves to contain them, nothing was out of the ordinary. One man fell off the cliff and died, and the rest of the group took their search to the cliff with special rock climbing tools and the like.
Then mother died. Dad seemed fine, but then he disappeared. I woke one morning to find partially destroyed gardens. I climbed through them, searching for clues to what happened to dad. I found no sign of his physical self, although I saw many that showed how upset he had become. In the house I found broken boxes, half-packed suitcases of kitchen supplies, broken plates and lanterns and torn clothing. Jewelry lay littered on the floor. I saw so many broken things, I was sure he had hurt himself. Then I thought the worst–he jumped off the cliff, like the other man accidentally did.
So I walked through the graveyard. I saw pieces of many graves, partially collected in piles or half-constructed nativity scenes with statues of other religious figures, collections of flowers tied off and placed in stone vases. I saw broken stones, their jagged pieces pushed partially together with other stones to recreate quotes from the bible, scholars, religious figures. It felt as if dad tried to reconstruct his religion through the shaped pieces of graves. Of father I saw nothing. Perhaps he didn’t do it, either. Perhaps it was the graveyard mourning for him.
The search crew, hanging off the ledge with tiny hammers and picks, said nobody jumped in the night. Along the crumbling wall near the cliff, multicolored prayer flags had been folded into crosses.
I walked inside and found dad sleeping breathlessly on a chair. I nudged him awake and said I was afraid he had killed himself. “Why would you think that?” he asked, although on his face I saw he had considered it.
“All the destruction to the house and the graveyard, all the pain I saw and felt because mom died. I don’t know what I thought.”
He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “It’s alright.” We then walked the graveyard together, and I woke up.
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