Grief, in dreams and spirituality

a long winding way to say “God? maybe!”

(Written on a phone so excuse the typos)

I woke up this morning teary-eyed. In my dream last night, there was a part where I went to go FaceTime my mom. When the call finally connected, it was my Nona who had picked up. In it, she said, “Hi Camille, I love you and I miss you.” I remember feeling an overwhelming amount of love in the moment, for a split second believing this moment to be real. That my grandmother had truly picked up the phone and we were going to converse. Then as I tried to continue the conversation, I realized I was instead playing a clip from my phone I had recorded. And then, I woke up.

For the first month after my Nona’s passing, I was distraught, not just from her death but because of the fact I hadn’t dreamed about her yet. I told my mom, “Mama, I haven’t seen her yet. She hasn’t visited me.” And my mom replied, “She’s busy celebrating, dancing and playing bingo with all her friends and family.” This answer was enough to placate me.

Eventually, I did dream of her, briefly, in early January. I was sat in the living room in our house in California, waiting for my mom to be ready so we could go do something. Then, I turn to the chair that sits in the corner, next to Snickers’ bed, and she was there, sitting and smiling. I looked at her in shock, and when I blinked, she was gone.

My mom called me that day, after I woke up. She told me that she had had a dream about Nona. I told her excitedly that I also had one. It felt like a sign, a real connection, that she had paid us a visit and had checked in.

I was raised Catholic, and as I stepped away from Catholicism, I still remained spiritual. (But, the more I think about it, maybe it’s just OCD.) I always dreamed and aexperienced bizarre and odd bouts of deja vu. As a kid, I remember once “waking up” and seeing the figure of Santo Niño (a very beloved in our household and many Filipino households) looming over my mother and I’s bed. I had woken up the next morning and told my Nona, who then said that I was very blessed to have him watching over me.

I remember feeling a little guilty, because even then at a young age I didn’t like Catholicism as a concept, didn’t understand why such a benevolent and loving God would require such stringent and strict rules. If He were so universally loving, why does He care if I go to church on Sunday? Or what I wear? Or if I eat meat during Lent? Needless to say, I was skeptical.

As the years went by, my relationship with Heaven and God morphed into more of a pen pal situation. By middle school, I was pretty separated from Catholicism in any physical sense - no catacism, no church, no rosary, etc. But what did stay constant was my silent praying - talking to God as if He could hear me. It would go a little something like…

“Hey God, sorry haven’t checked in in a while. My bad. School’s hard and it’s hard making friends. Could you, like, I don’t know, fix that? I know you probably have a lot of other issues, but, you’d be doing me a solid if it could just be a little easier.”

I loved this image I had crafted, that my God, in my own head, was someone I could speak this casually and open to without judgment. It was nothing like stuffy interpretations in the church, and it made me feel less alone.

Obviously there were moments where I struggled. I didn’t understand how there was war and famine and death and plague, and some powerful being sat there not intervening. But even as my relationship with God and religion was complicated, I still believed that there was some higher power and that after death, there would be some paradise in its highest form waiting.

After the death of my Papa in September and my Nona in December, I suddenly found myself in a Catholic church service for the first time in several years. At both services, I opted not to receive communion. I felt uncomfortable putting on a guise like I had partaken and believed in these traditions. I thought it would be more offensive to my grandparents to do something half-heartedly than to even do it at all. Still, though, I knew that religion and faith were monumental in both of their lives, and so I tried my best to respect their wishes. I prayed the rosary, I did the novena, and I still carry around prayer cards that my Nona had gifted to me throughout my life.

Now, after the death of my Nona, my relationship to God has shifted once again. I find myself turning to a higher power a lot now, but instead of speaking with God, I’m speaking with my Nona. I ask her things like “Is it fun up there? Are you with your mom?” or sometimes just tell her little things about my day. “I’m working really hard at work right now, Nona. It’s hard, but I know I can do it.” Other times, I’m crying inconsolably. “I’m sorry, I know you don’t want me to be sad, but it’s so hard. It’s so hard.”

I view her as my guardian angel. When things are difficult, I think of my Nona and think of how she is watching over me. I know she has other things to do (the first week of her passing, I asked my mom whether she thought Nona had met Elvis or the Beatles yet, you know, assuming they’re up there), but even then I feel a little less alone, in the same way I did when I was a little kid just chit-chatting with God.

Throughout my life, my mom and my Nona always told me that we had some “gift” in our family, like some power to feel the supernatural or the otherworldly. That they too had weird feelings and premonitions and because of it, my mom always told me to go with my gut because oftentimes it was right. We had other superstitions, too, like whenever we saw moths or butterflies or beetles, my Nona would say it was some relative of mine that had passed a long time ago. Or if we’d smell a candle in the house, even though we knew nothing was burning, that it was a visitor from the other side.

I don’t know if I have some gift or if it’s even real, but all of these things in the way I was raised have amounted to me feeling closer to my Nona, even when I can’t see or speak to her.

I’m currently reading Pachinko, a book that follows a family generationally in Osaka during the 1930s (aka, Japanese occupation of Korea and then the eventual wars that follow suit) and religion is a big part of the book. In Book 1, there’s a passage where Isak, a pastor, is speaking to our protagonist’s mother about faith:

“‘I talk to the dead although I don’t believe in ghosts. But it makes me feel good to speak with them. Maybe that is what God is. A good God wouldn’t have let my babies die. I can’t believe in that. My babies did nothing wrong.’

‘I agree. They did nothing wrong.’ He looked at her thoughtfully. ‘But a God that did everything we thought was right and good wouldn’t be the creator of the universe. He would be our puppet. He wouldn’t be God. There’s more to everything than we can know.’

Yangjin said nothing but felt strangely calmer.’”

Kylee, my friend from college, and I have been reading this book together in a book club (with Ariana, too!). Kylee herself is religious and we have stupid bits where she’ll go “God is good WHEN?” and we shout back “ALL THE TIME!”

But recently, we’ve been having more serious revelations, talking about maybe how she’s exactly where we need to be and God is the one that led her on that path. That God made it so she ended up in Ohio and then God told her to leave, and now she’s receiving opportunities and possibilities she wouldn’t have had before had she not gone to Ohio in the first place. “God works in mysterious ways,” she had said. And every day, I think I feel that sentiment a little more.

It’s still heavy, I think. I wake up some mornings like this one and realize I have to live my whole life without my Nona. But then, I think back to my spirituality and these conversations and whatever amorphous blob of faith-superstition-spirituality I have racketing between my ears and realize that my Nona is right there with me. And though it hurts and it’s difficult and it’s devastating, I feel a little better knowing that she’s somewhere up there, dancing and playing Bingo among the stars.