A few weeks ago, my brain decided that it wanted to remember my Dad’s voice. I tried my absolute hardest to imagine him sitting in his chair in the living room and us having a conversation. I couldn’t hear my Dad’s voice. I have videos of us when we were on holiday in Florida that I’m sure will have his voice on it, but I am just not ready to watch those videos yet. I’m not ready to look back at old photographs either.
For about three days, my brain seemed obsessed with trying to hear my Dad’s voice. I could imagine Dad sitting in the chair and rolling his eyes at a comment that one of us may have made and that was as clear as day. I just couldn’t get a voice. I tried everything I possibly could not to think about it but it just seemed that at every available moment my brain was telling me I had to remember Dad’s voice.
I thought about asking my sister but virtually immediately dismissed that idea. She was back at work after isolation and the kids were driving her up the wall before they finished for the holidays. She had too much on her plate to ask her what I thought she might think, was a really stupid question.
You have to remember that being BPD, if you get an idea in your head, it can become obsessive very quickly and I really didn’t know how much was grief and how much was BPD. I certainly wasn’t going to tell Mum that I couldn’t remember his voice. What if I was doing something wrong? What if people can specifically remember their loved ones voices and actions and images? What if the BPD itself was doing this to me? No idea. But, In the end, I just couldn’t take it anymore as the need/desire to hear Dad’s voice had literally taken over my life. That may seem extreme to “norms” but that is genuinely how it feels when the BPD really kicks in. Things become an obsession.
So, I met up with Jill. I can’t say that I was keen to ask Jill because I didn’t want to trigger her. She seemed to be holding up reasonably okay for the previous few days and the last thing I wanted to do was upset her. But, I just could not deal with my brain forcing me to try to remember Dad’s voice any longer. And my brain figured that given we were dealing with a similar situation within a similar timescale, maybe, just maybe, Jill was experiencing similar thought processes.
Jill and I met, we talked and I was still incredibly nervous of asking her. Eventually, I told her that I can’t hear Dad’s voice and I asked her if she was finding the same thing. She said that she could hear them in certain situations, e.g. she could hear her Mum on the answer machine and her Dad saying something specific but it was not something that her brain had challenged her over or, indeed, she had thought about in any great detail. This opened the floodgates for me. I just cried. Not a few tears. But, I sobbed. I couldn’t apologise to Jill enough for offloading onto her. She cried too. We do pretty much set each other off now, even if we have been doing okay for a few days.
I can recognise that as my pattern though. I thought I had been plodding along reasonably okay, just dealing with the BPD and Bipolar, not going outside the front door and trying to stay distracted during the day. However, I think that maybe my brain was trying to tell me that I needed to vent for a bit and get out some tears and trying to get me to remember my Dad’s voice would, ultimately, lead to a bit of a meltdown. Or, is that the BPD over analysing the situation? Well, I’m going with the former on that one because after I had sobbed with Jill, although I was incredibly tired (and I slept for about 20 hours afterwards), I no longer had the nagging thought in my head trying to hear Dad’s voice.
Anyway, last weekend, I had the most fantastic dream that had both Mum and Dad in it. It was so vivid and clear. When I told Mum about it, she told me that I had to write it down.
In the dream, I had gone to visit Mum and Dad. They were living somewhere not known to me. I remember that Grimsby was mentioned in the dream. We have no friends or relatives in Grimsby so I have no idea why this would be important. Dad was test driving a car for the weekend. Not your bog standard, new car. Oh no, this was a classic car. I would say around about the 1930’s. I can’t be precise about the make or model but just imagine something in the style of a Morgan but with back seats, the roof down and the colour was grenadier red. (Grenadier red was the colour of my Dad’s beloved Jaguar). Dad was test driving this classic car for the weekend, but said that I could drive it. Me and Dad in the front and Mum in the back, with the top down. I reversed out of a gravel driveway (we had a gravel driveway at my childhood home) but the house we were leaving is one my parents lived in but I never did (188). We were pulling out onto somewhere that resembled the top of Blackheath in South-East London. My parents have never lived there, but I have lived near there. Anybody that knows Blackheath village, knows that it is a one way system of narrow roads around the village that go up and down. We were driving down to junction and I said to Dad that he had to hit the brakes too because I wouldn’t be able to stop the car on my own. This car apparently had brakes on both sides at the front and it needed two of you to apply them.
We continued our drive around and I was getting used to the double clutch gear change and we appeared to pull up in a park. It wasn’t anywhere that I recognised. People were coming up to us and asking about the car. Mum and Dad were saying how lovely it was and I was telling people what a nightmare the brakes were! Dad mentioned about my sister. He said that he thought she was moving house. I asked him why and he said that because they hadn’t heard from her for ages and she must up to something!
We carried on with the drive and Dad directed me back to the showroom to return the car after the test drive. I successfully pulled into the showroom where other people were also returning their test driven cars. All of the cars were of a similar style but different colours.
The last thing I remember about the dream before waking up is Dad saying to Mum, “It’s still at a reasonable price Cheryl” and Mum just tilting her head and saying, “well, you’ve got the money if you want to get it”. I heard my Dad’s voice as clear as day in that dream. It was genuinely as if he was back with us. It was that vivid. I’d spent days trying to get Dad’s voice into my head without success and then I heard it in a dream. I didn’t wake up from the dream sad or crying. It’s the first dream I can remember that I’ve had with Dad in it since he died. I woke up just with a sense of, “well that was a batshit crazy dream” but I heard Dad and it left me with a smile. Maybe that’s why my brain decided that I should remember it so clearly. Maybe my brain realised that once I had offloaded, I needed a little “reward” and that reward was to hear Dad’s voice.
Living The BPD Life 