staring-at-the-sun-yalom

40 staring at the sun
ovoid. I try to move my feet to make waves which would
push the leaves back, but my feet are weighed down by
sandbags. Or maybe it is bags of lime.
“That’s when I panicked,” she said, “and woke up
yelling. For hours, I avoided going back to sleep lest I
return to the dream.”
One of her associations to the dream illuminated
its meaning.
“Bags of lime? What does that mean to you?” I
asked.
“Burial,” she replied. “Wasn’t it lime they threw
into the mass graves in Iraq? And also in London during
the black plague?”
So the intruder was death. Her death. Her husband’s
death had left her exposed to death.
“If he can die,” she said, “then so can I. So will I.”
Several months after her husband’s death, Alice
decided to move from her house of forty years into a
retirement home that offered the care and medical
backup required by her severe hypertension and limited
vision from macular degeneration.
Now Alice grew preoccupied with the disposition
of her possessions. There was room for nothing else in
her mind. Moving to a small apartment from a large
four-bedroom house packed with furniture, mementos,
and a collection of antique musical instruments meant,
of course, that she had to dispose of a great many be-