Yesterday was weird. I woke up thinking it was Wednesday (and it wasn’t it was Tuesday, but when I woke up I didn’t know that.)
I woke up and thought about the dinner specials a pub we go to has, and looked up the pub’s menu, and let Rhys know it was one of the specials we like to take advantage of for our date nights. These Date Nights aren’t fancy; we go to the pub, have dinner out, come home after a lovely meal.
I got up and made myself brunch, the posty arrived with a parcel of books for Rhys (which he told me to open for him; Sword Art Online: Mother’s Rosary vol 1 and 2, and Ravine by Stjepan Sejic; vol 1 and 2 – believe me if you like dragons it’s worth it and the art is GORGEOUS Sejic-sensei’s got mad skillz, and I kinda wish he’d do a fanart of Holly and Milo from Monster Hunter International, but he’s a busy man so…) and I had my brunch in the front room to wait for any other deliveries. You see, the parcel postman is different from the LIGHT PARCELS postman, who may or may not deliver the occasional envelope as well, and then the fellow who drops off envelopes and flyers into the mailbox is someone else as well – this has been a recent development, and believe me it’s weird. There’s something going on at the posties because I’ve got several packages late; and in this case I was waiting for a piece of forwarded mail which was very important to us.
I was waiting for a letter from the Queenland Coroner’s Court.
By midafternoon I decided the second or third posty wasn’t going to show up and went upstairs, with the intention of writing, taking my little Monk Parakeet Riley with me. No sooner had I set him on his climbing perch playpen than did I see the second postman drive away on his little motorbike from our front door. So I went back downstairs, and sure enough, there was a parcel of two books and several envelopes – including the book I grumbled about yesterday, which was three weeks late, very unusual for the seller and the post, but Rhys thinks they’re trying to get things set up for the Christmas rush and rumble. And there was the letter from the Coroner’s.
I don’t really know how to describe how I felt then. Relief that it wasn’t missing. Looking at it as if the envelope were a rabid rat about to bite me and hurt me all over again – and I called myself a fool because losing Brandon is a wound that will never go away, really. The scars will sometimes bleed. I asked Rhys if he wanted to open it, and he said I could go ahead. I decided not to, and suggested we go out for dinner.
The children got home soon after that, and it was chores and make-dinner-for kids. Then Rhys came home, there was a bit of chat about the new books and him assuring me that hopefully some of the packages I’ve been waiting for will still turn up.
We went out and then I realized, as we sat down, that it wasn’t Wednesday, but Tuesday, and the special we were looking forward to wasn’t up. Besides the sadface about not having the meats we wanted, Rhys was curious to find out how I’d lost a whole day.
That was when I realized that I’d only dreamed what I thought had been Tuesday – actually getting up and seeing the kids off to school, having breakfast and doing some work around the downstairs workstation and then being driven upstairs because that corner of the house is too cold, playing Star Trek Online for a few hours and cooking a stew of beef, red wine and plums, and being so tired that I went to sleep without reading a little – all in the dream! – and slept deeply until 10:30 am.
It was very disorienting to come home and check for the jar of canned plums and finding it still there, unopened.
I’ll have to cook the stew I made in that dream this weekend. O_O At least Rhys didn’t miss out on it!
We opened the letter from the coroner and yes, it was a formal notice that Brandon’s death was ruled by the coroner to have been unspecified sudden infant death, and we could get an updated death certificate.
I cried later that night, though Rhys was able to get me to laugh by saying that the formal ruling was very much in keeping with our grumpy, defiant little boy. “He made the coroner work for it, and he died mysteriously so they couldn’t find a cause of death.”
And I laughed, and remembered the full tanker of gas that had driven up to the crematory just after we had had Brandon’s funeral sendoff. Rhys had suddenly laughed, with pride, “Good on ya, little guy,” – at the thought that the tank was necessary to cremate such a tiny little boy.