In the meantime, the trips to New York to the hospital were over, the racing around filling prescriptions, giving pills on schedule, doctors' appointments, waiting in hour long lines in the summer heat to park at the hospital, the whole, long struggle to save Tom's life, all that was over and the struggle for my son’s and my future began.

Tom and I had been together for over thirty-five years. This last year we had been together constantly, in a desperate fight for his life. Now he was gone, and being parted from him was so painful, I could hardly bear it. How could we not be together? It wasn't just that I was physically missing him by my side, although I missed everything about him: his voice, his smile, the very special twinkle in his eye that never went away, no matter how bad things were, and his sense of humor. But I was also missing something much more fundamental, a vital part of my life had been torn away, leaving me feeling like half a person.

 In the next few months, there was so much to be done, I didn't have time to think or feel, or even dream. In the past, I'd never paid much attention to my nighttime dreams. They'd been just like everyone else's dreams, usually forgotten before I was even fully awake. However, during this phase of mourning, when it seemed impossible to comprehend his loss, I had another lucid dream, as they are called.

In this very brief dream, which was unusually vivid and colorful, Tom and I were facing each other. Tom looked handsome and healthy. He gazed at me intently as he held up a glowing tube full of swirling, pastel colored smoke. The tube had small hatch marks on it, like a ruler. With one hand on either end of it, he rocked the strangely fascinating tube up and down. Then with great seriousness, he said to me "This is the timeline." I studied the timeline tube. It was fascinatingly lovely with its gently roiling smoke in all the colors of dawn. As I looked back at Tom, quite clearly, he and I were still very much together outside of the timeline, but, for now, that pretty, glowing timeline separated us. The dream was so vivid, and the sense of Tom's presence was so real, that I was consoled. I had not lost Tom forever. Somehow, we really were still together, outside of time.

That's it. That's all there was to the dream, and that also made it different from most dreams, which usually move from one strange image through a bunch of others before they're over. This was just that one very powerful and vivid image and the words, "This is the timeline." The glowing timeline was lovely to look at. It glowed in all shades of pink, coral, blue and lavender, like smoke caught in a tube. The timeline. A tube of smoke. What could it mean?

(Later, I discovered a passage in the New Testament that seemed to echo what I had seen. James 4:14 New King James Version (NKJV) 14: whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away.)