I’ve already described the general shape of my life over the following decade — the years of therapy, the eventual move to Fernwood, the quiet job and slowly rebuilt sense of stability I’d worked hard to construct in the absence of the twin sister who’d once felt like the other half of my own identity. I want to describe, in a bit more detail, exactly how incomplete that healing process ultimately proved to be, understanding now that some part of me had apparently never fully closed the specific uncertainty left by that closed casket.
I’d experienced, throughout those ten years, a recurring, difficult dream in which Vera appeared trying to tell me something I could never quite understand before waking — a dream my therapist and I had worked through extensively, generally interpreting it as a fairly ordinary manifestation of unresolved grief rather than anything more specifically significant. I understand now, with everything eventually revealed, that this recurring dream likely reflected something considerably more concrete than ordinary grief processing.
