Worries and Nightmares

Monday, July 4, San Antonio, TX

After Arne died, I made four more trips to Denmark--one a year for the next four years.  Things were different, of course.  There was no place I could go without memories of our life together, so I found no pleasure in being out and about in the city.  Plus, I had to worry about the strain it put on friends, especially on Nurse Grethe, since I always stayed with her.  There were two plans to deal with these problems.  One was to make a trip from Denmark to cut up my visit into two parts.  One year I went to Estonia and Latvia for about 12 days and bookended it with 4-day stays in Copenhagen.  Another, I went to Lithuania with brief Danish stays on either side of it.  Eventually, I followed the plan of making shorter, whirlwind stays without a side trip.

On the upcoming trip, I am staying longer than ever before--12 days.  It is worrying me.  Friends have asked me to visit, and I have missed them.  Some of them are beginning to have health problems.  Three (Arne's sister, Arne's brother-in-law, and Old Grethe) have died since the last time I was there.  The reasons for being there so long are because this is probably my last visit to Denmark and because weekends are the easiest times to try to see people.  All of that meant that I needed to be there two weekends with my arrival early enough for me to make some adjustment to the time change.  But 12 days is a long time to be in a city where memories of Arne are magnified by everywhere I go and everyone I see.  And it is a long time to burden a friend with a visit in her home.  Those are worries I have been facing regarding the beginning of my travels.

Over the years, I have had a continuing series of nightmares.  They began with dreams that Arne was alive again.  The nightmare part was that he was living in Copenhagen in his old apartment and working back at WHO while trying to piece his life back together and showing little interest in my visiting.  Everything he had owned had been distributed to his two estranged brothers (his only legal heirs, since his "sister" was really his step-sister), so he was using make-shift furniture in the apartment.  And he was seeing someone else there.  There were elaborate details to the dreams.

As the series progressed, we eventually agreed that I would make a trip to Copenhagen to see him.  He was distant, but nice.  All along, I knew there was someone else and was frustrated that things couldn't be as they were before.  It was a short trip, and I returned to Texas after only a few days.  Each dream/nightmare took the story a bit further.  Over time, his boyfriend disappeared, and we started seeing each other regularly.  It was never the same as before, and it was always based on me visiting him there.  In each dream, I had fears he could die again at any time, and the level of intimacy was never as strong as it had been previously.  Slowly, however, it became a pleasure to have the dreams because they were positive again and because it was like we were able to have more time together.

This morning, dreaming of him became mixed with dreaming of my upcoming visit.  In the dream I knew I was staying with Grethe, but I also seemed to be aware that Arne was alive again.  The nightmare came when Grethe suddenly died during one of the first days of my visit.  It did two things.  It forced me to realize that Arne wasn't really still alive, so I had no place to go.  One day, I took a train somewhere up north, thinking I just had to fill my time.  But as soon as I arrived, the memory that it was a Friday and that I had an obligation that evening at someone's summer house kicked in.  I couldn't remember who it was, since my trip involved two weekends with summer house visits on both.  And I realized I had no time to do anything where I had arrived.  I wasn't dressed appropriately to visit anyone, so I couldn't just head to the summer house, plus I didn't which summer house because I didn't know who I was supposed to visit.  As I waited to take the train back into town to check the schedule, change clothes, and to try to make it where I needed to be, thoughts of the fact that I really shouldn't be in Grethe's apartment after she had died (similar to the real situation I had been in 12 years ago when Arne died and I wasn't legally supposed to be in his apartment since we had never married each other) entered the dream along with the realization that there was no place I was really supposed to be in Copenhagen.  That's when I awoke.

Surely the visit in Denmark will be fine.  But this nightmare has made me realize that I feel a lot of stress related to it.  I couldn't return to sleep, so I got up to write this blog entry.  And I worry that the dreams of Arne still being alive will now come to an end.