Last night I dreamed I was on a battlefield. As bodies flew and bones cracked around me, I felt a hand touch my leg and it was my mum. She reached out to me and all my fear disappeared. I held her hand and we told each other "I love you" and she kissed me. I had just enough time to say "thank you" before she was gone, and I was still holding her hand when I felt the end come.
I woke up - obviously really bloody confused - but also crying. Because I realised that "thank you" was everything.
I'm aware that a battlefield scenario is fairly extreme, but I don't think it takes a therapist to figure out the symbolism, given the state of the world. Covid-19 has seen tens of thousands die and the whole world has been impacted. We spent the majority of the past month in total lockdown, trying to keep each other safe.
Just prior to the outbreak, I went through my own type of personal hell. As a result, I left my job, my home, my city - my whole life that I'd spent 30 years building for myself - and I came home to live with my mum, like I vowed I never would.
I vowed I wouldn't because that's the fear society and media heaps upon us our lives: That if you're living at home in your 30s, you're a failure and deadbeat. I spent a lifetime striving for "success", to attain a particular title or amass enough praise or fund a certain type of lifestyle. Then I got it all and realised none of it mattered. What did matter was health and family and for many, especially for us Maori and Pacific Islanders, the two inexorably go hand in hand.