dream meaning

My cousin IM'd me. Told me how a couple of days ago she had dreams of MG, my cousin who passed away in a car accident earlier this year. She had several dreams that night all in a row. Dream, wake up, dream, wakeup, all going back to a dream with him in it. In one, she is riding a white car with him and some other relatives and they get into an accident and he dies and she is planning his funeral. In another, they're just hanging out the way they used to. She doesn't remember the other ones, she just remembers he was there. She asks me what does it mean. I tell her, I don't know. But I think alot of us wish we had been there to know what happened in that crash. She asks again, do you think that's what that means? I tell her again, I don't know.

There was once we asked my Taroh cards about him. One reading indicated he was with his girlfriend, in her dreams. When we asked the girlfriend, she said yes he had dreamed about him the night before the reading. It was the only time she had dreamed of him.

After the wedding of my now sister-in-law, we were busy cleaning up flowers. As I loaded the truck outside, the then boyfriend called me to look at something. When I went in, he pointed to a single rose on a pillar, the sun from the window highlighted it in some picture perfect moment. Did you put the rose there?, he asked me. I said no. He didn't recall putting it there either, but there it was, a flower so delicately placed. Maybe his parents were there. Maybe. We brought his parents flowers on their grave that day.

After my grandfather died, I returned to the Philippines 7 months later. I had dreamed of him for a moment. I was at home, watching him leave on his morning walks that he took every day. I watched him leave, he raised his hand to say he was leaving, I could hear my own voice say goodbye, then the dream ended. I still mourn him when I recall that dream.

Last weekend, we had the one year death anniversary for ninang. A year goes by so quickly. A year. The traditional time frame to remove the veil of mourning. But I don't think the mourning ever truly ends, there are always moments of missing. Of hearing a song sung, and feeling a presence filled. The transition, the ritual is important though, a way of remembering that we are the living ones, to remember that we must go on and live in whatever anger, sadness, joy, hope that we have.

At our wedding, as my brother sang Ave Maria, we placed a single sunflower at the base of the statue of Mary. In honor of our loved ones who could not be here: his parents, ninang, MG. It was Ninang's favorite flower. In the grand and small moments of our lives, there is a wish to share joy, a need for witness. We leave places in our heart for the people we love and they stay there even when they are gone.