I don’t fully subscribe to the notion that dreams are some kind of looking glass into the unconscious. However, I do find it fascinating how our dreams can reshape memories and deepen our connection to loved ones—those who are with us, and those who are not.

The dream

I was a firefighter, in full bunker gear, walking through a grocery store. Many of the settings in my dreams are both infinitely large and impossibly small. The aisles felt oppressive. A labyrinth of shelves sprawling ad infinitum. The towering abyss pressed and stretched; simultaneously omnipresent and absent.

The vastness wasn’t so much empty as indifferent. It held nothing. Fear needs a backing and this had none.

I stumbled on the linoleum.

As suddenly as the sublime fear of disappearing into vast nothingness arrived, it faded.

I felt a tap on my shoulder.

I turned, immediately recognising the kind eyes and gentle grin. My grandfather, who I called Papa, and who died a few years ago. Bespectacled, adorned in his brown leather jacket, he saw me and I felt known in a way I had always wished I could be known. He teetered, nearly falling into a produce stand. He gripped my arms and I pulled him back to standing.

As he stood, he wrapped his arms around me and my head nestled on his chest.

He felt seven feet tall.

We swayed. Dancing in the produce aisle of a grocery store the size of the known universe. Grief shuddered through my spine. I wanted to tell him how much I miss him; how much I longed for him to know this version of me; how dearly I hold his memory.

Instead, I awoke.

The longing

While I don’t believe I exist to be something for someone, it’s nonetheless a sort of privilege to be something for a specific someone. It’s a privilege to take up real estate in someone’s heart. To me, that’s the only real estate we keep after we’re gone. It’s a privilege to be a part of someone’s sense of self, and to allow that person to be a part of yours.

But my Papa doesn’t get to know this version of me. His real estate is secured in my heart, but he doesn’t know me the way I wish he could. He knew me as an inquisitive yet reserved child, a queer adolescent, and an independent adult. His death robbed us of the opportunity to know me as a self-assured trans woman.

I started my transition journey in 2021 about four years after leaving Ontario. I had settled in Winnipeg, and took roughly annual opportunities to visit family “back home,” for lack of a better phrase.

The grief

I find myself wondering if the grief that aches within me is rooted in the sense—as misplaced as it may be—that I was still a failure in my life by the time he died. Historically, I viewed myself as the person who abandoned aspirations, ambitions, or even interests. While that certainly has afforded me the opportunity to experience a variety of what life has to offer, I often question whether or not I have anything to show for those experiences.

Grief is odd in that way: it makes us introspective and, for me, burdens my mind with oppressive self-doubt.

When someone we love dies, they become a part of us. The living carry the dead forward and, in doing so, are shaped by them more profoundly than when they were alive.

In my dream, I held Papa as much as he did me. He showed me I can be all of the wonderful things he was in his life and, by doing so, carry him more gracefully than I thought possible.

If we are ultimately the product of those who came before, I am proud to have Papa as a featured piece in my mosaic.