Crossroads

I have started dreaming of Joseph more and more lately. The night before last I dreamed I was in this vast, rolling green meadow/foothills kind of area. I was walking, searching..I kept coming upon children in groups of three...all very happy, playing together. I would ask them where Joseph was and they would continually point me onward with smiles, over the next hill and the next where I would meet yet another group of children, but never finding Joseph.... but ever the feeling that I had just missed him, that he was just over the next hill, that these children, who were happy and robust, were just with him, just playing with him.. It was a pleasant dream if a bit exhausting. Last night's though was truly disturbing. I dreamed that Joseph was still in the hospital..that we were mistaken, that he had not died, and that he had been waiting waiting waiting for us all this time. As morning broke and I came to greater consciousness I was soooo confused and full of angst and pain. Was he dead? Was there some horrible mistake? I didn't know what to hope for. I kept seeing his little face as it was in the dream, so ill, so sad, so lonely and so accepting that we just weren't coming back fora long time, so that when I finally realized it and showed up again he didn't even see me there at first. The haunted, hollow feeling of guilt and failure has clung to me throughout the day and then the deep, abiding sadness that I really did watch him die, that he isn't really down at the hospital, that my poor brain just cannot wrap around it sometimes, even now.