My Mom and Her Predictions of Doom & Gloom

My mom is in a rehabilitation center, recuperating from her most recent fall during which she took a good hit to the head. I would hate to see the damage she did to whatever it was that her head hit, she has a hard head. Still though, she was pretty seriously injured with a subdural hematoma, stitches, bruises and so on. She is much better already and as I said is already in rehab.

Today, when I went to see her, she was sitting at a table in the dining room talking with another resident and with that lady's family. They had just finished up a birthday party for the other lady. As I approached the other woman was just finishing talking about one of her sons or grandsons. I got there just in time to hear my mom talking about her son who she told the others is a policeman. Sh told them that her son had recently been shot and she was worried as to whether or not he was doing well. She said she was mostly worried because she had not heard from him or anyone else as to how he was doing. She went on to tell them that he had been in law enforcement a long time and this was the first time he had been shot. She again repeated that she wondered how he was doing.

By this time, I had been standing right next to her for about half a minute or more. One of the young men who was visiting the other elderly lady looked at me, then at my mom and just said: I think we are about to find out. At that point, I said hi to my mom and she burst into tears and asked me how I was and how I had gotten better so fast after having been shot! It was sad, it was amusing and it was scary all at once. I was happy to explain to her that no one she knows had been shot - especially me. She then said she saw it in the news paper and it mentioned me by name. I explained maybe she had gotten confused and that was good enough for her. I have to admit though - there have been lots of shootings of police officers lately and if she saw a paper recently I understand ow she could have gotten that into her head. She has dementia and just let me say it allows the imagination to run wild and the sub dural hematoma she just suffered could certainly make things worse.

I visited with my mom for a couple of hours and we talked about this and that. She brought up my having been shot several times more during our visit. Each time, when I assured her I had not been shot, she seemed content with my answer and smiled but then asked if I had ever been shot? Then she said something that made my spine tingle. She said guessed she had dreamed that I had been shot and then said she had been dreaming about it a lot. Just thinking of her saying that made my spine tingle again, just now, as I sit here at home typing on my keyboard. You see, she had this thing about dreaming about blood. If she dreamed about blood, she would tell the whole family the next day and tell us all to be careful because it meant something bad would happen. She did not do it often and that is what makes it so scary. You see, when she did dream about blood, more times than not, something almost always happened to someone she knew well like family, friends or coworkers. The something that happened was never good. I would say she was on the mark about 60-70% of the time.

Just coincidence? I would say so but coincidental often enough to make it scary. I remember one time, while she was napping, she dreamed about her second husband, my step-dad, all bloodied up. She woke up all afraid and such and the next thing you knew the phone rang and it was someone from his job, or the police, or maybe even himself calling to say he had been injured in an accident or something like that. Other times, she would tell us about her dream and the next day or two we would find out an elderly relative had passed on the day of her dream or the day after. It was always something that happened after she told us about it. I don't remember her telling me that she dreamed about blood in a long, long time but today she did just that and her dream was about me having been shot! I was thinking, in a half hearted way, I may just have to wear my body armor for the next couple of days whenever I go anywhere and maybe I had best be extra careful tonight when I clean my sidearms. I really don't think it a harbinger of doom but it still gives me the heebie-jeebies to think about it. Now that I think of it, maybe I had best be extra nice to my wife too, just in case...

All the best,
Glenn B