It’s only when our hearts break can God’s tear slip inside and fill it with something that wasn’t there before so that we too may someday help someone similarly bereaved.
🥹🫶🏼
From my dream journaled (and edited) on the early morning of 5/14/26:
When Love Returns as a Garden
Last night, I dreamed my late husband was alive.
He was back in my life, standing near me as if the impossible had quietly become ordinary. In the dream, I was not immediately overwhelmed by the miracle of his return. Instead, I found myself trying to understand the strange gap between what I thought had happened and what now seemed to be true. Where had he gone? Why had I believed he was dead? Why had he been missing for so long?
There were questions, many of them. Human questions. Grief questions. The kind of questions that rise from the deepest part of the heart when love has been interrupted by loss.
But he did not want to talk about it.
And then something unexpected happened inside me. I stood there, looking at him, and realized I was OK not knowing. Not because the questions did not matter. Not because the missing years did not ache. But because I loved him so much that I did not need to possess every explanation in order to feel the truth of the love.
In the dream, I understood something I do not always understand when I am awake: maybe this is what real love feels like.
Real love is not always the demand to know everything. It is not always the need to interrogate the mystery until it becomes manageable. Sometimes real love is the softening that happens when the heart says, You are here, and I love you. That is enough for this moment.
Then he told me he wanted a son.
He said we would have an opportunity to adopt.
I wanted to know more. Of course I did. The old reflex returned — the need to understand, plan, prepare, secure. A son? Adoption? A future? A family? A chance at something still unfolding between us?
But before I could grasp it, he disappeared again.
And I was searching for him.
That is how grief moves, isn’t it? It gives you a glimpse, then takes it back. It lets you feel the warmth of a presence, then leaves you walking through rooms, landscapes, and memories trying to find the person who was just there. The heart becomes both witness and detective. It searches for signs. It asks the air where the beloved went.
But as I searched for him, I found a dog.
The dog represented our dog, or maybe all the love that had survived in animal form. He kept biting me on the back of my right calf. Not viciously, but insistently. Again and again, he bit the back of my leg, and I could not understand why.
Why there? Why now? Why bite me when I was already searching, already longing?
Only later, after waking, did the image begin to speak.
The calf is what helps us move forward. The right side often feels like action, direction, the part of us that steps into the world. The dog, loyal and instinctive, was not trying to hurt me. He was trying to get my attention.
Maybe he was saying: Stop looking only for what disappeared. Pay attention to what is still here.
I was in a place full of horticulture. A living, growing place. People were cultivating their own food. There was a pond. There were strange vines with fat cucumber-like fruits growing from long poles. These cucumbers filled with juice, and people were squeezing them, almost milking them, as the liquid poured out. Then the cucumbers would plump back up again, as if replenished by some endless source.
It was one of those dream images that makes no literal sense and yet feels completely true.
The garden was abundant. Regenerative. Alive.
The cucumbers were emptied and filled again. Drained and restored. Given from, then renewed. It felt like an image of grief and love at the same time. How many times can the heart be emptied? How many times can it fill again? How many times can we think we have nothing left to give, only to find that some hidden source is still feeding us from below?
Then the dog jumped into the pond.
He was swimming and playing in the water with these little cucumber-like shapes at the bottom that looked like puppies. It was surreal and tender and oddly joyful. The dog, who had been biting my leg on land, was now playful in the water. The same force that had interrupted me was now showing me something beneath the surface.
The pond felt like the unconscious, the emotional world, the place where memory and mystery live together. And there, beneath the water, were these strange little puppy-cucumbers — part animal, part plant, part nourishment, part innocence. Life was not organized into categories. It was merging. Transforming. Becoming something new.
And still, I was looking for my husband.
I could not find him.
But I was so happy he was alive.
That may be the truest sentence in the entire dream: I could not find him, but I was so happy he was alive.
Maybe that is what love after death becomes. Not certainty. Not possession. Not the ability to hold someone in the same way. But a strange, luminous knowing that something of them is still alive somewhere — in us, around us, through us, beyond us.
Maybe the dream was not telling me that he came back.
Maybe it was telling me that love never fully left.
It returned as a husband who would not explain the mystery.
It returned as the possibility of a son, of adoption, of new life arriving in an unexpected form.
It returned as a dog biting the back of my leg, tugging me out of my search and back into the living world.
It returned as a garden.
It returned as water.
It returned as food that replenishes itself.
It returned as creatures playing beneath the surface.
It returned as the recognition that I do not have to understand everything in order to keep loving.
I have spent so much of life trying to know. Trying to understand why things happen, why people leave, why the world breaks, why love is asked to endure such impossible separations. But this dream offered me something gentler than an answer.
It offered me an image.
A garden after grief.
A place where the heart can be emptied and filled again.
A place where the dead are not simply gone, but transformed into symbols, instincts, animals, water, nourishment, and future life.
A place where love does not end because the story becomes mysterious.
Perhaps real love is not the opposite of grief. Perhaps grief is what love becomes when it has nowhere obvious to go. And perhaps dreams are one of the secret places where that love is allowed to move freely again — not bound by time, logic, biology, or death.
In the dream, I wanted to find him.
But maybe the dream wanted me to find the garden.
And maybe the garden was telling me this:
The beloved may disappear from sight, but love keeps growing in forms we do not immediately recognize.
It may nip at the back of our legs.
It may swim through deep waters.
It may ask us to adopt a future we did not expect.
It may feed us from vines we have never seen before.
It may return, again and again, not as an explanation, but as life.
And maybe that is enough.
Maybe that is what real love feels like.
🙏🏼
Jenny
“The question is not what you look at, but what you see. “ ~Henry Thoreau