📿I Tend to Worry About You

Worrying about the ones you love when you love unabashedly

Where you visit me in my dreams and in response I just worry about you

“It was never worth worrying about someone you didn’t love. And it wasn’t love if you didn’t worry.” - Gabrielle Zezin, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Last night I had a dream. I’ll be brief about it, as I’m a firm believer that someone describing a dream that you’re not in is slightly less interesting than someone describing how they fold their laundry. However, you were in it, in some sense.

The dream was me emerging from an underground nightclub in Manhattan right as the sun began to rise. In the busy New York intersection many people gathered from miscellaneous parts of my life, chatting with one another about some of the issues concerning them right now: issues with their jobs, their kids, their health and more.

I thought to myself, “I worry for them. I’ll worry for them until I die.” Underlying this was a feeling of wanting to make sure they were all provided for; that they would be okay, after I go.

When my father was in the dying process one of his last acts was not conscious; it was a primal instinct that I now understand as a father myself. He shot straight up in bed and started repeating my name and one additional word, posited as a question: “okay?” My name and “okay?” over and over again.

“Yes,” I was able to tell him, squeezing his hand, “I’ll be okay.” There’s something sweet and heartbreaking about one of his last acts being a deep concern for my well-being. Perhaps this dream, coming not on the anniversary of his passing but of Adreanna’s father’s, is some fatherly instinct on my part hoping, praying, but yes, also worrying that when I am gone my loved ones will be okay.

I think about my death every day.

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