8 February 2005. I have awakened from a dream. My head is aching. I have wept.

The dream was so vivid, so real that for the first few minutes of waking I had difficulty reconciling its truth with my other knowledge of reality. I dreamed that a beloved friend had arranged for me to consult her attorney sons on some point of law. I cannot remember my questions. But I remember her sons. Tall, like her partner. One broader of build and dark-haired, the other more of his dad’s slenderness with hair the color of his mother’s. The older one was more serious and accepting of the conventions of his position; the younger, who did not speak after the greeting, held a world view of greater irony, hidden pain, and a ready humor. My question was answered quickly and easily, but with a gracious space of consideration so that there was nothing glib, no imputing to me of stupidity or inappropriateness in my need to ask. I knew my appearance before them had answered slight questions in their minds about their mother’s friend. I found an opportunity to speak to her, as she seemed to be leaving the apartment, to tell her how lovely these two young men were; what a fine accomplishment her teaching and raising of them.

I was shocked to have to revise the dream’s intense reality for, in fact, my friend is unintentionally childless. During some minutes of mental work, comparing information in various sectors of my brain, I negotiated the stairs and let the dogs out. Then, I remembered the glimpse I had stumbled upon last night on the Internet of a young woman—the daughter of friends I’ve not seen for decades. Next, the dilemma that had kept my husband and me up past midnight quietly exploded in my brain.

While searching on the Internet for the “bereaved families” organization founded by the grandmother of the young woman, I discovered that a gay professor has published a novel based on his brief friendship with M., the older woman’s daughter. My ex-professor husband has written of his relationship with M. in a manuscript that was turned down by the house for which he edits university texts. This published author worked for the same publisher before he returned to teaching in a university. M., in the truest sense, had been my husband’s wife before I met him at her funeral. How, in relationships spanning the continent, could the circle be so small? The published book contains whiffs of my husband’s writing. The rejection of his manuscript must have been more complex than either of us guessed.

The cyber image of M.’s niece fulfills many of the assumptions I made 30 years ago about the families my friends and I would raise. Pretty, fashionably dressed, professional, and sparkling, she appears to have achieved what most parents hope for. She also looks enough like her late, murdered aunt to be her daughter. I wonder how her genetic legacy shaped life within a bereaved family?

Today, my husband will accompany, to his lawyer, one of our sons—the child genius now 24, mentally and emotionally scarred by substance abuse, who recently has begun to attempt living adult life outside of this, his natal home. My questions constructed during sleep to the mythical sons of my friend C. likely referred to him.

Last night the long-dead engine of my husband’s creativity turned over a few times and sent out a shower of blue sparks. The two of us fiddled and kicked at the rusty gears of brains that had once seemed designed for literary production. The desire has not expired. I was surprised at how passionately we felt, having exhausted our energies in the grueling work of raising children through poverty, illness, and other assaults of the Adversary. How could we dare to contemplate the career that escaped us in our thirties and forties? Yet, that is exactly what inspires us. Preposterous. Undeniable. The world may have changed too much to be interested in our voices, but the yen to shout and sing still surges.

I wanted to write stories. They would have been like my dream—constructs of my imagination, which—you can see from this dream—falls far short of solving any of life’s burning questions. I wanted, in the metaphor of my friend Margaret, to be a long-stemmed rose. But the truth she wove into a woolen tapestry for me is that I am a wild rose made to bloom in the cleft between a rock and a hard place. The life God chose for me and how I have managed to hang in there is a tale of visions and miracles more difficult and more useful than anything I could have invented. If I have anything to give back to the world in gratitude for those gifts, it is what I have learned about the differences between introspection, creative imagination, memory, and the “future perfect” prophetic images and words that also arrive via the subconscious or semiconscious mind. In consenting to Christ’s love for me, I consent to love those brought to me and theirs are the stories that I tell.