When I was a child, I was closer to my grandmother (Nana) than to anyone else. I stayed with her every chance I got, and I was honestly more inclined to share my problems with her than with my parents. I always knew I was welcome in her home, and we never stopped having that kind of relationship.
Life and school and adulthood are beasts any way you look at it, but not least because they take your time away from people and things you care for greatly. Nana and I never became emotionally distant, but I didn’t get to stay with her much form junior-high onward. By junior year of high school, I’d only see her once or twice a week. By freshman year of college, I only saw her once or twice a month.
I didn’t realize late in my junior year that I hadn’t visited her in six months, then one day the phone rang and they told me that she’d had a stroke and was comatose. I went home, but she never woke up and she passed away about a week later.
I was extremely upset, but my grandmother had always taught me that death is a natural part of life. She said that she wanted me to have only good memories of her life and our time together, and so her being gone felt more like her going home to another and a better life. I helped my family clean out her house, and then I had to return to campus to finish out the year.
Fast forward one year, and I was getting ready to graduate.
It’s important to note that I wasn’t in a good place personally. I had been dating the same girl since sophomore year (a girl I thought I was going to marry, to be honest), but we went through a pretty hideous breakup (she dumped me) over the course of my last semester. To make things worse, I had become disillusioned with my career choice (Biology major). As I said, I got into a pretty serious relationship during the third semester of college, and I think that that masked the boredom I was feeling with my coursework. I mean, I was planning on getting married and settling down almost as soon as I graduated. I had intended to go to graduate school followed by a teaching position, but once I was single again I realized that (without a spouse and maybe children to immediately support) I was suddenly a guy with a degree in something that I honestly had grown sick of.
I finally broke down and told my folks this, and they responded in a very supportive way. They offered me my grandmother’s house (which they now owned) to live in until I figures out what to do with myself. I happily accepted, and I packed my dorm room into two boxes and sped off after exams.
When I arrived, everything looked just as it had been left. My folks had brought in a maid to keep the place clear of dust and pests, but no one had lived here in a long time. I took my things in and unpacked as soon as I arrived, and by the time I put my suitcase away it was almost dark outside. My mom had stocked the fridge, so I put together a small meal, showered, and got ready for bed.
I couldn’t really sleep with everything that was on my mind, so I decided to make tea and try to calm down. I was sipping away in a very comfortable armchair, and I guess I dozed off.
I woke up suddenly, and I instantly knew that someone had me by shoulders - shaking me. In the dim light of the one lamp I’d left on, I saw a form that (at first) I assumed was my mother. The voice sounded like hers if a bit distant, but I was 97% asleep. In my punch-drunk state, I stood up awkwardly. The person in front of me let go and began tugging at my arm and talking about how it would all come right soon and saying that “family always makes things better”. I assumed that my mom had let herself in (I hadn’t told them that I was arriving that day and I forgot to call them when I did) and was telling me to go lay down and rest.
About that time, the sleepiness in my eyes wore off and I started to be able to see details of the person who’d woken me up.
It was Nana, plain as day in her Sunday print dress and with her trifocals resting on the end of her nose. I got that unbearable goose-bump chill that paralyses you in nightmares and I started to back away. I couldn’t move very fast, and I had one of those moments where you realize that you’re dreaming. Strange thing is I didn’t wake up, the image of my grandmother and the hallway behind her just faded to black.
I actually woke up at about 5:30 the next morning - in the bed. I wasn’t sure how I’d gotten there and the dream from the previous night was still fresh in my head. I assumed that stress and fatigue had caused me to have some kind of nightmare, and I wrote the whole experience off as such.
Cut to that Friday morning, five days after I arrived at Nana’s house. I hadn’t had anymore dreams, but at about 10:00, someone starts knocking on the door - rather furiously. I open the door, and it’s my ex girlfriend (Hailee). She was crying, and while I stood there looking all confused she just threw her arms around me and held on like I’d just rescued her from being lost in a desert.
I sat her down and, when she’d stopped crying, she started to tell me why she’d come (all the way from Tennessee where we’d been going to school- Vanderbuilt).
She told me that starting on Monday night (the night after I’d had the dream about Nana-her exams bled into the week after mine), she’d had this recurring dream where she saw me crying. She told me that a woman’s voice kept telling her every time she had this dream that she was making a mistake. It apparently had a deep effect on her, because she said she couldn’t stand not being with me and that my parents had told her where to find me.
I didn’t really think about it at the time because I was so glad to have her back, but in later years something came out that really unnerves me. The voice in Hailee’s dream was telling her that she had to come back to me because “snuffles” loved her and that she’d never be happy if she didn’t put things back the way they should be. She was seeing an image of me while being told this, and given what had happened she just inferred that the dream voice was talking about me and didn’t think anything of the name.
I was a huge Sesame Street fan as a little kid, and I loved to watch the show on Saturday mornings (I always spent Friday night at Nana’s). My favorite character was Snuffleupagus, and so my grandmother’s secret nickname for me was Snuffles. No one ever heard her call me that, and I never told anybody about it.