The girl who dreamed someone to death

Perhaps it was because my family was made up of Irish immigrants and still very much immersed in the myths and folklore of that ancient culture, but for me and my sister as children the veil that separated the real world from the supernatural was not entirely distinct and we felt that it was possible to push it aside and be touched by extraordinary events. As evidence, my aunt’s haunted house that [I've written of] previously. But there was another event that occurred a few years after the adventure involving the haunted house that had a more poignant and profound impact on us and that convinced me forever that the distinction between nature and supernature is itself wholly inadequate as a description of reality.

From the time she was tiny, my sister Maggie had been the favorite of our grandmother. Never an easy woman, Nana was often brusque with the children in the family. She had been raised in a strict culture where children knew their place and that place was usually at the end of the table and silent — she had little patience for the liberal upbringing practices her own children and many of the grandchildren (myself included) knew her withering rebukes if we got out of line. But Maggie was doted upon and even her non-stop chattering (she’d been “vaccinated with a phonograph needle” my mother used to say) never seemed to bother Nana. In return, Maggie loved Nana unconditionally and warmly — something the rest of us could never quite manage. Maggie would spend every summer with my grandmother learning how to cook and garden and do needlework. Their relationship was more like a deep friendship reaching across generations. Extraordinary and lovely. The photo accompanying this post shows Maggie aged nine during one of those summers with Nana, who was then in her 70s.

My grandparents ran a boarding house in upstate New York and long after my grandfather had died and their children had moved away to start their own families, Nana maintained the house by herself for the small number of loyal boarders who still occasionally made the trip up from New York City. It was a lot of work even for a strong woman in her 70s and, eventually, she had to let it go and the house was sold. Nana relocated to the city to live with my aunt, but she and my sister remained close. A few years after the house was sold — the winter that my sister was 14 — Maggie began having strange dreams. In the dreams, Maggie would be back in the boarding house with Nana, helping her in the kitchen just as she always had — but Nana would be distressed or anxious about something than was impending. In one dream, she came out of the pantry trying to carry a huge black iron skillet to the stove, but the heavy skillet weighed her down so that she could barely move. In another dream, Maggie and Nana were sitting at the kitchen table having tea when suddenly a young woman in her 20s wearing all black walked by the kitchen window and peered in at them. My sister asked my grandmother who the woman was and what she wanted but Nana could not respond. The dreams were full of ominous symbolism and pervaded with feelings of dread and they disturbed my sister deeply. My mother would comfort her by saying that Nana was well, hale and hearty, which was true. But the dreams continued, for weeks.

They culminated in a remarkable dream in which, once again, Nana and Maggie are sitting at the kitchen table shelling peas. Suddenly, my grandmother looks up from her work and says, “Maggie, I have to go now.” She stands up and walks to the center of the room and starts to get younger. As my sister sits crying and begging her not to leave, Nana regresses through each stage of her life — here she is as a mature woman with color still in her hair, now as a young mother, then she is the young woman in her 20s wearing black who appeared at the window, and continuing until finally she is a baby in a diaper sitting on the floor in the middle of the kitchen and then she is gone. I remember that night because my sister woke from the dream hysterical and roused the entire house.

As I said, for the Irish, such dreams are not to be taken lightly and my mother shared them with my aunt, who reassured us that Nana, despite diabetes that was being treated, remained basically well. But, of course, the story does not end there. A few days later my grandmother suffered a massive stroke and died suddenly. My aunt, a devout Catholic, comforted my sister by calling her a “witch”. Oh well. I was — and remain — awestruck by the wonder of what happened and the starkly beautiful, poetic way that it unfolded. Somehow, out of the normal flow of time, a warning was communicated to someone about one they loved very much. In reality as we understand it, it couldn’t happen. But it did.