Before I Wake

I’ve been thinking a lot about aging lately, and doing it, a little more each second. I used to look forward to growing old, growing beyond the cultural pressures of beauty and success. But these days I’ve been afraid of it—of losing my mind and what mobility and vitality I have. I never understood the attraction to the idea of a fountain of youth until recently.

If I should die before I wake…

But right now we are young and the angles of our faces aren’t yet lost in folds of skin. Let’s kiss while we’re like this and let’s not forget it; let’s take lots of pictures so we’ll remember. Future generations will stare wide-eyed at the photographs, barely believing that grandma and grandpa were once young and beautiful.

Or will we die just like this, our youth immortalized by an abrupt absence from time?

If I should die before I wake…

It seems presumptuous to assume that we’ll achieve old age when we have no idea what fate will give us for Christmas this year. There could be coal in our stockings, no matter how well we behave. We are nothing but a rush of air expelled from the lungs of God.

So we pray for good things and for lots of time, and I like to pray with you. Your prayers are prose and they are beautiful to me when the two of us join in divine conversation with God.

I often pray in my dreams. In the bad ones, of course I pray for Him to save me. In the good ones I say bless this food, our Father who art in heaven; now I lay me down to sleep. If I should die before I wake, if I should die before I wake…

But I never see God in my dreams. Maybe this means something. Maybe it doesn’t. But it’s funny, that for all the strange and wonderful and horrible and completely random things my subconscious has put me through, it has never offered up an image of God.

When I was a little girl, maybe four or five, I dreamt I was in a cemetery. Satan and his demons were gathered on my right, snorting and pawing the ground. They snarled at Jesus and his army of angels, who stood fierce and silent to my left. I was in the middle of them and they were preparing to battle for my soul. Maybe this means something. Maybe it doesn’t.

If I should die before I wake…

But I wasn’t afraid.
How such a little girl comes to dream of such things, I don’t know.

In my dreams my hair is long. Maybe this means something. Maybe it doesn’t. But that’s how it always is.


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