Death of a Maiden: In defense of dreams, divorce and other urgent messages from the dead

It's time we told the real real.

It seems to me most people think you have to hate each other to not want to be together anymore. I don’t blame them.  Hating him would have made leaving easier, at least in the beginning, during that initial, painful unraveling of a love that worked so well, for so long. Until it didn’t.  

I remember the first dream of the dead body.  Oh yes, dear reader, you read that right.  And it was a series, not unlike the carnage piled behind Bluebeard’s locked cellar door:  all that remained of the discarded lives of his countless wives.  I, too, was once a doe-eyed young bride, holding a key to stored secrets I didn’t want to see.  But psyche has a way of bringing to light all that lies lurking just out of our chosen line of sight.    

Still newlyweds, my husband and I were well on our way to baby-makes-three.  We had just bought our first home together and moved from a historic two-bedroom Tudor to a funky 1960’s split-level with room to grow.  It was also the scene of the  crime  dream:  I approach my husband on the steps leading from the entry to the sunken formal living room full of vintage furniture reupholstered in bright chartreuse, all sitting atop an ivory shag rug.  A pinup-worthy scene, if you ask me, especially when you throw in the stacked limestone fireplace stuffed with books.  But don’t worry, this fire went out a long time ago.  We’re safe.

Back to the dream:  I approach my husband and say, “there’s a body in the attic and we have to bury it before it starts smelling and someone finds it.”  That night in the corner of our blackjack-covered backyard, we push our shovels into the thick fescue and dig an enormous hole just out of sight of Tom, our retired neighbor who hand-built the retro, wrought-iron fence we share. 

The size of the hole was overkill, far larger than was necessary for interring the dead guy in the attic. An omen from the dream-maker, perhaps: keep digging, honey, this is only the beginning.  We dug the hole, but we never did bury the body.  

So somewhere in my dreamscape today, there still exists a beautifully remodeled mid-century home, surrounded by roses in every color, on a tree-lined street, with a gaping hole in the backyard next to a mound of dirt and a dead man wrapped in shiny, black plastic stowed away in the attic.  It would take over ten years - three of which I spent in Jungian Analysis - and a few more nightly features starring a corpse as the lead role before I realized the identity of the ill-fated John Doe of my dreams.  

Fast forward roughly a decade.  I’m a mom now to two unimaginably magical girls.  In the final dream to date of this feel-good series, I am standing behind my boxy station wagon parked downhill from a large community cabin atop the hill where my womb-children (as I like to call them to their faces) are gleefully chasing one another on the green, sunlit lawn.  The back hatch is propped open.  It’s just like my car in real life, down to the cracked white paint and chipped tail light from the time I backed into my husband’s F-150 just weeks after I bought it on an impromptu road trip to Austin’s wildest weekend of the year: South by Southwest.  I dial my husband’s number and peer into the back at - you guessed it - yet another plastic-wrapped dead guy.  

Except this time, the size of the, ahem, cargo and its duct-taped contours, indicate this hombre is only a torso with a head.  Here lies John Doe, ladies and gentleman, back for one night and one night only, lifeless and limbless in the back of your mom’s station wagon.  

My husband picks up.  I emphatically entreat, “Where are you?!  You were supposed to help me bury this body.”  

End scene.

Now, I have a lot of dreams.  I record most of them and have for years.  The first thing I do each morning is snatch my phone off the charger, reach for my tortoise-shell spectacles to peer bleary-eyed through the stork’s nest that is my hair and set to frantically fingerspell everything I can recall with the stiff, swollen hands of a thirty-something arthritic.  All my dreams go into a Google Doc titled Dreamy Woo Woo Magic Journal, because it’s also filled with synchronicities and stranger-than-fiction stories, which I secretly hope my children stumble upon someday after I’m gone when they go snooping through my digital archives.  I would sincerely like for my dreams to endlessly haunt their own.  This feels like loving from the great beyond.  Let me now declare that this is my dying wish.  That and a full choir and marching band trailing the hearse carrying my remains to the first green burial site in Oklahoma, just outside my grandparents’ hometown.  Take note, readership, lest you too be haunted.

A few days following the surprise cameo by the long-dead John - we’re on a first-name basis now - I’m eagerly anticipating the day’s FaceTime session with my Analyst.  Now, as a therapist myself I may be terribly biased, but I love therapy.  A lot.  Our sessions are usually on Thursday and I pull out all the stops.  I clear the dining room table and put out a whole spread:  there are two kinds of goat cheese, chevre drizzled with honey, sourdough crackers, some sort of berry and a mason jar of sweet tea.  Always sweet tea, sweetened, unfortunately, with stevia tincture and not the white sugar in the pink paper bag that my inner child truly craves.  Because against my better judgment, I’m adulting (and did I mention I have arthritis?  What’s more depressingly adult than that?).   

During today’s session, as I’m enjoying my cheeseboard for one, Tess is eating roasted seaweed, straight from the wrapper.  We halfheartedly (almost) apologize for eating in front of the other, but it’s only a formality.  Neither of us really gives any f*cks for formalities.  I may be projecting, but we like that about one another.  From both sides of the table, if you spend enough hours in the therapy room, you quickly lose tolerance for anything less than real.  The real real.  

I’d love to write a book about my therapy sessions.  If I ever do, I’ll title it after Tuesdays with Morrie.  I would say I’d make it more uplifting than the beloved book that ripped my heart out in my early twenties when I was a philosophy undergrad trying my best to remain blissfully cerebral (read: dissociated), but given that the centerpiece of our present topic is a reappearing corpse with mildly murderous connotations, it would probably be a lie.  

There’s one therapy rule I’m supposed to follow:  send all dreams in advance of our sessions.  My compliance rate is fifty percent at best.  And this week, I’m delinquent.  Oh well, I settle into snacker’s paradise at the beat up kitchen table, hand-built by my husband, and prepare to drop some carnal knowledge on my favorite dream maven.   Wait, that came out wrong; this is Jungian Analysis, not OnlyFans.  I meant ‘carnage,’ sincerely.  Let’s save this Freudian slip for the subject of a future post, shall we?  Back to Thursdays with Tess… 

I spill the tea on the station wagon’s latest haul and before I know it, we’re deep into one of those sessions where she says: “You know, Joanna, we both know I’m not supposed to do this, but I’m just gonna say it…”  I grin with glee.  These are the moments I live for in all areas of life:  when the tired rules of propriety go out the window and the real real can enter the room, oxygenating the air, and everything quakes, brought more alive from the sudden influx of the higher octave of truth.  She continues, “I think the dead body in the trunk is your husband.”  Time stops.  Suddenly the highest note in our shared digital space is a piercing silence shattering the fractured, fragile facade left lining the surface of my life.  

Of all things, a station wagon.  Sure, it’s an 2017 true-to-me take on the 1980s throwback Volvos of my sweet sixteen dreams, but as much as I hate to admit it - I’m pretty sure I’m a four on the enneagram - it’s also the pearly white standard of a suburban soccer mom, sporting the perfect life, organic snack-game at 100.  But one wrong look in the rearview and it’s a tragically less comical remake of Weekend at Bernie’s. 

My jaw stung from the swell of years of unspoken grief, too great to recount, pushing up tears that rolled heavy down my cheeks.  If I could’ve seen the tiny square of my own image on the screen through the flood, I would’ve seen my complexion mirrored back to me ghostly white, as the secret truth of my life drained the blood from my body, spilling out onto the oak floorboards beneath my feet:  The man I married was dead to me.  And he died a long time ago.  

Dream analysis is largely an exercise in free association.  We hone in on a single dream image and let loose the wild mind, hoping it will gift us with insight for charting our next steps, hopefully more so all the wiser for having entertained these divine influxes from the dreamtime.  

“What’s your association to the dead body, Joanna?” Tess asked me.  I didn’t have to think long.  Or at all, really, as the memory of the first dream I had somehow buried pushed its way upward into my stubborn consciousness.  Our new home was supposed to be a new start.  Here was where we would forget what happened in our marriage's tragic beginnings that took place in the tiny Tudor we left behind, hoping never to look back.  Connecting this last dream to the first in the series was like looking back on a trilogy after receiving the long awaited final piece of the literary or cinematic puzzle.  It unlocks the power of hindsight and instantly erases any confusion in the unfinished muddle of the middle of a fable not yet fully unfolded.  

The day after the analytic atom bomb dropped on my life, leaving me to question why it is again that I pay good money to endure the voluntary torture of deeper self-awareness, I was sick - so very sick - sicker than I’d been in a long time.  This was no head cold, or even a flu, it was a knowing ache - no, a tremor - in my bones.  There were no outward symptoms to be seen, but deep inside I was chilled, with the bitter, cold truth no amount of heat would warm and no collection of trendy, faux fur blankets could cover.  I woke up that morning, thawed my numbness enough to get my girls ready for school, dropped them off, and promptly crawled back into bed, still trembling as the ugly truth stored in my marrow seeped out to the surface layers of my life.  This is shadow work.  Pulling piles of white cotton and stonewashed linen over my head, I told myself:  Today, I rest.  Tomorrow and everyday after, I integrate.   

I’m reminded of the title of a book I haven’t read (probably for good reason):  Feelings Buried Alive Never Die.  And as my delightful dream series so clearly demonstrates, they sometimes reanimate as corpses that literally haunt your dreams.  

Here’s a sticky note my ten-year-old passed under the door of the bathroom to my six-year-old last week after a quibble over who gets to go first.

At least I hope it was her…

Now if I’m a writer worth my salt, this next part is where I am to dutifully tie it all together for you in a pretty package wrapped with recycled paper, printed with vegetable inks and tied with an elegant bow made from organic cotton sourced from sustainable family farms.  It’s the point where I reveal to you the story and symbolism behind my dreamy dead corpse of a husband.  How exactly did he die?  And why?  The real real.  

But I must say, this is the part that I most don’t want to share which, for a writer, also means it’s the part we must share the most, for some weird, unspoken rule from goddes-knows-where that we will spend our entire lives protesting - usually with a litany of swear words - but following nonetheless.  I think they call this resistance.  

So, naturally, right about now is the time I’d like to put some sort of satisfying substance in my mouth - whether it’s a gluten-free donut or the inhaled smoke of fresh, hand-rolled desert tobacco - in order to simultaneously delight my senses and shove this most unwelcome and decidedly uninvited harbinger of hard truths back into the hellish place from whence it came.  Where the sun don’t shine, if you will.  And I know you will....   

And what do we do when we encounter our own fear-based avoidance?  We remember these words from the ineffable Georgia O’Keefe:  “I have been absolutely terrified every moment of my life - and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.”  And we carry on… whether calmly or hysterically is entirely one’s own personal choice.  No judgment.  This is a safe space.  Let us proceed.  

Why, you ask, is the dreammaker delivering up my husband bound in plastic like post-apocalyptic Postmates sushi?  I knew the moment she said it:  “I think the dead body in the trunk is your husband.”  The deep cavernous landscape of my own body and psyche where I had tried to bury the brutal reality could no longer hold the gravity of that first betrayal.

I could’ve chosen to hate him then.  I would have been justified.  An annulment for which I was, like every woman in each role she plays, most overqualified.  It was only a month after I’d donned my last maiden’s gown, covered in layers of ivory silk hand-stitched from a sketch I’d drawn on notebook paper.  I looked like a Grecian goddess; little did I know that I, myself, was an etching of cold marble, a maiden frozen in time, made modern-day with a sweetheart neckline that pushed up my B-cups, during a time they didn’t need pushing up - unlike now after three-and-a-half years of breastfeeding.  But up went those beautiful full-B’s saluting that big Oklahoma sky and the 350 guests lining the aisle of white, ribbon covered chairs under countless glowing globes suspended from the rafters of the rustic, downtown historic Farmers Market building where we were married.  

Like Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes of Vasalisa the Wise in Women Who Run With the Wolves, my “breasts were bounding,” but here with my own reimagining of a mashup with The Fool card of the Tarot:  blissfully forward-facing with only a knapsack to my name, chock full of naivete, but tits up!  I ran headlong into the spring of a marriage fated to perish before the turning of summer.  Before it even had a chance to bloom.

The bride of Bluebeard was the youngest of three sisters.  The man was a charmer whose reputation preceded him, but unfortunately not in this iteration of the tale.  He quickly won over the three of them and their mother during an orchestrated afternoon picnic in the countryside.  But upon returning home, the elder sisters returned to their wits and wised up, remembering their initial suspicions of his beard’s ominous blue hue.  They are older, wiser, their intuition intact.  The pair try to dissuade their youngest sister from saying “I do.”  But the damn thing… she did do anyway, in spite of her sisters’ advice.  And soon she was the lady of a fine castle with many wings, a hundred rooms running down the length of each one.  And each with its fill of all the wares she could wish for.  As lady of the house, she is at liberty to make herself at home in any room she pleases.  Any room, that is, but one.  This one is locked, at the end of a grand hall to which a tiny, beautifully etched scrollwork key belongs.  By order of her husband, she is not to enter this one room under any circumstance, not even so much as a peek.    

It was not our beloved bride of naivete who swung open that dreaded cellar door to reveal the rotting remains of Bluebeard's countless betrothed; it was her sisters.  It wasn’t the doe-eyed, willfully blind maiden in me at the young age of twenty-five who decided to count the condoms in the nightstand next to the bed I shared with my husband before I left on a trip for my first “big girl job” as a fundraiser for a local non-profit; it was the wiser, knowing one I did not yet know myself.  And if I’m being honest, the one I would have, at the time, liked to carry on endlessly without ever having made her acquaintance, thankyouverymuch.   

But alas, such a shallow fate was not in the cards for me.  It seems my constitution is such that I was made for making my way through life at a minimum depth of, let’s say, six feet under. So off I went, counting condoms which, unbeknownst to me, formed the beginning steps of the death march of my marriage that had only just begun.  Which in perfect synchronistic step, also formed the footprints of my beginning initiation into full, knowing womanhood, eyes wide open, an incurable condition whose chief symptoms are characterized by a kind of perpetual burning.  It hurts like hell, but imparts a rather rare glow that Maybelline can’t quite duplicate.  I boarded a plane to Washington D.C. not knowing I was leaving a reality to which I would never return.  No matter how many years I would spend trying to make it so.  

Back home, a world away, bent over the bedside table, I held the tiny box between sweaty palms, trying to gather the courage from my yet unbroken heart to count the crimped edges of each shiny, sealed package.  I forced a deep breath and compelled my trembling fingers to make the final count.  When I thumbed to the end, the hopeful silence was shattered by a panging ring in my ears.  My knees buckled as my heart, my whole world, fell… and kept falling.  I felt myself land on the edge of the bed, one hand holding the box and the other clutching the red, cotton coverlet.  Surely, the count was wrong, I thought.  I counted again. And again.  And again.  Still longing to see through the eyes of a naive bride, not wanting to look at what lies right in front of me, I struggled to still the spinning, swirling visions haunting my periphery:  the bleeding key, the proverbial pandora’s box I held in my palms unable now to slam shut, the missing two like the sisters whose knowing is unwelcome, the blood running down the dresses, and into the drawers below staining every neat compartment, the saturated bottom going out on my fairy tale life, the one that mere weeks ago had only just begun.  

A wedding made mockery.  A marriage, murdered by betrayal.  The man I thought I married was thrown out, in an instant, onto the parapet of some part of the castle of my psyche yet unbeknownst to me.  That day, it rang throughout the land, but I was none the wiser:  my beloved bridegroom, the one I thought I knew, was a dead man.    

And in order to stay, I would have to kill off a part of me, too.