My wife died suddenly aged 54. The next night she spoke to me in a dream

I realised I’d probably gone back to work too soon when I began crying uncontrollably at the airport.

I was looking out of the window to the planes on the tarmac, trying to hide it, but a colleague spotted my shoulders shuddering up and down from the other side of the lounge.

Richard Castles and his wife, Emma, in February 2024, two months before she died suddenly.

“Are you OK?”

There was no point trying to put the cat back in the bag.

“My wife just died. Somehow going away is harder now, when there is no one you are leaving, than when there was.”

I don’t think he understood what I was saying either. Somehow it was a double missing: a missing that was not going to be healed on my return. A separation from an absence.

I worked another week, putting on the public face, but then I took some more time off.

Grief is a long journey over rocky ground. You take the steps you need to take as unexpected obstacles appear. Going back to work was generally good, as otherwise I feared I might dissolve into my mattress like some human-shaped stain.

But then came the times I knew I needed to get away. I went to Scotland to scatter Emma’s ashes after a few months, which was mostly for her. Later, I drove up the NSW coast to finally howl like a wolf, which was more for me.

We had been together, with a few on and offs, for close to 20 years. Then one day she was gone. A double lung infection of acute bronchitis and pneumonia took her at just 54. She’d been to the doctor the day before, and sent home to rest.

With sudden, unexpected death, there is the shock to deal with on top of the loss. My father-in-law had been clear on the phone.

“I think she’s dead.”

But being precise is not that different to being vague or euphemistic in the language of death. Shock and denial will determine how much the message gets through. I raced home, certain he was mistaken and catastrophising.

Turning into our street, I saw an entourage of ambulances, paramedics and police cars. I had that horrible experience of walking into the living room, frantically searching from face to face for an answer. It was only seconds, but felt like a minute. No one seemed to take it upon themselves to speak, but of course the silence said it all. Deep down, the message had been received, if not fully comprehended, before my father-in-law finally uttered those soap-operatic words – “they did everything they could”.

I saw her on the floor in the other room, in situ, where they had done just that. My legs buckled. When they took her away, I wanted to go with her to wherever she was going.

For all I’ve said about my loss, it’s taken me a year to write or speak of those first moments. I’ve talked of other things, thoughts and feelings, but not about that shock.

Nor was I able to be as clear in my communication as my father-in-law. “Emma’s gone,” I texted one of my closest friends. To the shops? To another country? To another man? I clarified after he responded with confusion. No matter how it is delivered, receiving news of death has its own timeframe. How the penny drops seems to be a process rather than a simple message. In her book The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion says it was when she was introduced to her social worker at the hospital that she understood her husband had died.

It’s a remarkable human ability that our subconscious semantic processing is often quicker than our conscious processing. We don’t always assemble bits of information and determine its meaning; we get the meaning and then our conscious mind catches up. This makes evolutionary sense. In the wild, we don’t have time to think “hmm, orange fur, black stripes, big teeth, oh that’s a tiger, better run”; we start running and then our conscious mind pieces together why.

With the death of a loved one, something similar happens. The overwhelming reality rushes through us before we start consciously processing it. And that processing can go on for years. We call it grief. It can do odd things to you.

I’ve read and reread the Wikipedia entry on Schrodinger’s cat, the theoretical one that is somehow alive and dead at the same time, and I still can’t get my head around it. Surely, the cat is alive and then it is dead. There are no two states at the same time. But then …

Credit: Illustration: Matt Davidson

The day after Emma’s death, or maybe it was the next, I had a “dream”. I call it a dream, but perhaps I should call it a hallucination or a vision. Because in my usual dreams, the places, houses, people, and landscapes are all muddled up. But in this dream, Emma was sitting exactly where she often did in the morning, at the end of my bed, and could well have been right at that moment if she were alive. She looked just like herself. When I opened my eyes, everything was exactly the same, but without Emma, as if she’d clicked her fingers like Samantha Stevens in Bewitched.

“So, what’s on for the day?” she asked.

“But …” I replied bewildered, “you’re not here.”

At one level, it was a simple statement of what I had thought to be the case. But at a deeper level, I seemed to be saying “what’s the point? Why would I do anything if you’re not here?”

“You’re not going to let a little thing like that stop you, are you?” she replied.

Call it magical thinking, but the dream was so real it made me wonder if just maybe she was in the bardo of the Buddhists, the intermediate state between two lives, as described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Like a lapsed Catholic making a deathbed confession, just in case, I started praying for her safe guidance to the next life for the requisite 42 days. She seemed very much to be still around, Schrodinger’s-cat style.

I have managed to somehow keep going, though the point is still mostly unclear. Family, friends, birds, unread books … I just keep walking the path, but life as I knew it has changed.

Didion’s book opens:

Life changes fast.

Life changes in the instant.

You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

I put it less eloquently on my social media feed as I approached the first anniversary. “Life will come along and kick you fair in the cods.”

So, what’s on for the day?

Richard Castles is a writer based in Melbourne.

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