I dreamt of our, Pat’s and my, forever home. As the dream started I was in the western highlands walking Lochaber. The surroundings looked just like Pat’s painting “…painted on a board at twenty…A fantasy, I thought. A dream landscape: heroic, enchanted.” (The Loch by Patricia A. Bow) Then I was in the valley of the shadow of death walking hand in hand with Pat to the light at the end. The light was from the sunrise and made everything warm and red. Yet it wasn’t bright enough to blot out the stars and the aurora borealis. Then the sun rose to fully fill the gap at the end of the tunnel-like valley. It was blinding yet I felt I was looking at the face of Christ, the Son of God.
Then I saw a table before me set for breakfast and Pat sitting at the end waiting for me to join her. The lighting was warm as if from candles. Pat had prepared breakfast and set it before me. She was glowing and beautiful. All sorts of beautiful images blended together. The lilac grove of previous dreams surrounded us. Pat at the alter in the Church of the Holy Saviour Waterloo where Fr. Neil anointed her head with oil during communion when she was sick. Pat floating above me in our bedroom. Us toasting each other at the restaurant on her 70th birthday. Pat and her sisters, Bette and Deanne, on Christmas eve in our living room. All the pleasant memories remembered from her last year with me. All blended into a symphony of love. There were tears of JOY moments, tears of sorrow too – “she died before her business was properly done: death snatched the book before she’d filled the page. “ Her first Anniversary poem to me came to mind:
TO
ERIC
21 JUNE 1970

You love me royally, as I love you,
seated together in our garden Kingdom,
keeping up our silent conversation,
clothed in robes of joy of every hue.
For us, our royal love has had no parallel:
It rooted, grew, and like a miracle
spread to the garden where in now we sit,
Clothed in the fragrance of God in it.

And this long miracle is to discover
the inmost me and you,
to nurse no longing for another,
to forge the soul and its desire together
gently, openly and forever.

Nothing grows but common flowers
outside our Kingdom’s wall.
Here alone the magic lies.
We ask nothing; we have all.

We were in our garden home in Heaven alone with God and each other. The scent of the lilacs was everywhere. All was blended with scenes from our 2003 vacation at White Point Beach in Nova Scotia. It was paradise and very hard to describe. The images were all at once and so intertwined together to experience them you had to feel them. Pat had lead me here and comforted me and we were very much in love, happy and at peace. Surely, we were dwelling in each other and in the house of the Lord where we well dwell forever.

“So with you. Now is your time of grief, but I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy.” John 16:22