Somewhere in Time

wrestling with years, dwelling on things, thinking about Mom

by John Dittrick

I remember a vivid dream I had, when I was about 19 years old. In the dream, I slipped back and forth between realities, unsure which was truly “real”. At one point, I was in my parents’ house, in a cozy chair in my mother’s French country kitchen, reading a book. I fell asleep and found myself in the story. A story, strangely, about a bathroom, a black clawfoot tub, and a dying mother. I kept sleeping and waking, and somehow, somewhere in the story, my mother kept dying. I was trapped inside my head, and I needed to find where I really was. I walked outside the house and lay on the grass. “Am I really here? Is this happening? Am I still asleep somewhere?” A flower floated down from a tree and landed on my face, and I thought, “Springtime is sad too.”

 I woke up in amazement, feeling that something profound had occurred with this dream, but unsure of how to contextualize it. Looking back now, I think that dream captured something about the way I experienced my life in those years, and the way it was at times difficult to face, or even believe, my reality. I still have these moments of fear or doubt, when I wonder about whether I’m on the right path, or when I struggle to make sense of the way time has passed, and everything feels a bit surreal. It is a wondering at my life and the things that have happened, and a search for truth and meaning in the heartache and mess of reality.

My mom died in the spring of 2005. “Springtime is sad too,” I thought to myself in that dream. Certainly, that spring of 2005 was a sad season. And yet there was something hopeful in the fact that spring was turning as my mom died. Even as I faced this tragedy, new life was beginning. My mom died early in the morning on April 19th, a Tuesday. Later that day, I took a walk with a friend. The air was pleasant, the sun was shining. It was a calm day spent with my family and close friends. That night I sat in my mom’s loft, just off the bedroom she shared with my dad, curled in her blanket, on her cozy little faded red recliner, in front of her shelves, surrounded by her books. It might have been that day, or a day shortly after, when I read my mom’s journal from 1990, the year her dad died, looking for some comfort. On July 28, 1990, she wrote:

 “My father died two days ago. It is going to be all right. It is so hard, so hard, but, like in an adventure story, you have to go through the peril to get to the treasure. Life is like that. This peril is the hardest – facing death with all its attendants.”

 Those words, “it is going to be all right”, were a comfort to me in that moment. And though I was so, so sad, I knew I was going to be okay.

 Still, the following months were difficult, as I grappled with the reality of my mom’s death. I couldn’t quite believe it. I fantasized about being taken back by some divine force to the day she collapsed, returning to that moment with the knowledge of what was coming. This time, I could prevent it. We would go straight to the hospital rather than the Creighton University campus, where my mom was a professor and where the two of us meant to exercise that day. I was on spring break from school, and I had agreed to accompany my mom to the university fitness center – I would swim laps in the pool while she walked around the track. She wanted to stop by her office first, and we were at the top of a stairwell just outside the English department when her heart stopped, and my life changed forever. In the fantasy I would have weeks later, I believed that I could go back and change the outcome. I would go back to that morning, and this time I would save her. I would say, “Mom, listen, we have to go to the hospital.” Years after my mom’s death, I read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and recognized that obsessive, grief-driven belief that one could correct the past.

 If I wasn’t going to correct her death, I thought surely that I would get to see my mom again. I had a subconscious idea that she would somehow be in the audience at my high school performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (I was playing Puck). The show went on just a week or so after my mom died, and there was a part of me that believed I would look out and see her as I took my final bow. Of course, she wasn’t at the show, and I accepted her physical absence, quietly moving on from this fantasy without too much thought. But I continued to dream, keeping up the hope that I would see her. I was travelling that year to look at schools, and I thought I might find her sitting on a bench on a college campus. We would talk and she would give me some guidance, some final words of wisdom and reassurance. And if I didn’t see her on a college campus, I thought that I might just leap out of my body and be carried to the heavens. I would be able to talk to her there, for how could I be expected to face this life-altering tragedy without getting to talk to my mom about it – the smartest, most perceptive and most reassuring person I knew. She was the only one who could help me make sense of it all, and yet I was left wondering. At the very least, I thought she would come to me in a dream, as you hear departed loved ones sometimes do, and tell me it was going to be all right. I have dreamt about my mom countless times over the years, but never quite in this way, such that she would directly acknowledge her absence and offer me consolation.

 Maybe that’s not what I needed. I had her journals, her written “It is going to be all right”. I had her notebooks, her things, her house. I had a letter she had written to me the year before she died. Of course, I had her memory. I had countless moments of love and comfort and laughter to look back on. And I had my dad and my brother and my sisters, in whom I would see my mom so clearly. I would see her more and more as we got older; I would see her in my nieces and nephews – the grandchildren my mom never got to know, but who still carry her spirit. Several years after my mom died, I lost a good friend, Grace, and I was recently talking with her sister, Emily, who commented on all the places she saw Grace – in Grace’s friends, in herself, in the world around her. She talked about how the ones who leave us simply disperse. And yes, I see my mom everywhere. She shows up in my work, and she’s in the air as I walk through my life. If you believe that time is not linear, then, of course she is still here.

 These are comforting thoughts, and yet it is hard to wrap my head around all of it. Here is that wrestle with reality again. April 19 falls on a Tuesday again this year. It’s 2022, and 17 years since my mom died. I was a few months shy of 17 when she died, and so this year carries some added weight as I realize that I have spent more than half my life without her physically here. I can’t quite fathom this fact. I don’t know that I fully feel the weight of 17 years. Grief gets easier to carry, but I do find myself missing my mom in new ways. I mourn that I never got to know her as an adult. I’m more of a full person now, I’ve been to school and I’ve started a career, I’ve fallen in love and I’ve developed my beliefs. I’ve started to build my life and my home in earnest. I wish that I could talk with her about the things I’ve been through, the joys and hardships of my life, and the things that I’ve come to believe and understand. I wish I could talk with her about my work in interior photography as a prop stylist. My work shows up in catalogues, which is a certain serendipity, because my mom loved catalogues and things for the home. After she died, we recycled hundreds of catalogues. She was consumed with dreams for what her home could be. She loved dishes and lamps and linens, and certainly my love for all those things came from her. Now they are all my livelihood. I spend my working hours arranging dishes and furniture and objects, folding towels and draping sheets.

 I did a photoshoot with a friend recently, a series of household vignettes inspired by my mom. I feel so thankful to this kind photographer friend who helped me with this project, and I’m happy with these photos, though I’m still unsure about what I was looking to achieve with them – was I trying to reconcile something about my mom’s dreams for her home? Was I trying to bring her into the present somehow? Did I simply want to make a pretty picture? Perhaps I was trying to interact with my mom’s memory in a way that marked the time and helped me with this impossible task of fathoming a 17-year absence. I suppose it doesn’t really matter. It felt nice to have a reason to think about my mom and consider reminiscent objects. Bit by bit I have brought a few of her belongings from my family’s house in Omaha, Nebraska to my apartment in Brooklyn, New York, and some of these show up in the photos. There are objects that sat on her desk once upon a time: a French vintage hand-painted cup for pens with a matching letter opener, little owl figurines that used to watch over her work, and a round flowered box that once contained a mish mash of junk and sentimental tokens. I keep a few of her notebooks (she was a writer, a collector of ideas), a couple of her journals (ever a record keeper), and a copy of “Holy Mothering in Academia”, an essay she wrote about teaching and how it relates to motherhood. I have her eyeglasses, and one of her preferred pens – a Pilot Precise fine point. My kitchen keeps her Adams Lancaster English dinnerware, the dishes we used every day when I was young. It made me happy to interact with all these objects, to mix them with my own, to gather new pieces that remind me of my mom, and to put them all together in my home, in a style that I’ve cultivated through this work I do that reminds me so much of her.

 I went on a hunt for books that reflected my mom’s work as a professor of World Literature and Composition, her passion for both psychology and spirituality, her admiration for female writers, her love for children’s literature, her fascination with science, math, and probability. I sought out the books I remember her reading and talking about, perhaps because she was reading them for one of her book clubs, as well as titles I was provided by my godmother Kathy, my mom’s best friend, a favorite collaborator and a fellow idea-person. I pulled out my copy of Audrey Niffenegger’s A Time Traveler’s Wife, perhaps my favorite book, and the book my mom was reading at the time of her death. I remember my sister Kate reading from it as we sat in the hospital while my mom was in a coma. A few of us took turns reading, and I might have read a chapter myself. But I didn’t read the whole book until perhaps a year or two after my mom’s death, and I remember being struck by the place where her markings stopped (she always noted and made checkmarks as she read), just before a chapter titled “Turning Point”.

The Time Traveler’s Wife is a non-linear story, and I love that it seems to say that the ones we love are always there, existing somewhere in time. We miss them, of course, but they are there. And my mom, the most important person of my past, is ever in my present. As I continue to grow and become more and more my own person, I will forever be thankful for the way she influenced who I am and how I work, and for the many gifts she gave me in my 16 or so years with her. My mom, ever the dreamer, artist, and curator, left a lot of projects unfinished. Time is not always on our side, and life gets in the way. My mom was writing a book called “Deconstructing Penelope,” a modern telling of The Odyssey from Penelope’s point of view. Penelope’s suitors in this story were all the offers that came in the mail – they were the temptations, the distractions, the obligations that stood as obstacles before her. Despite all of life’s obstacles, despite the projects left unfinished, one thing that my mom did fully and devotedly was provide love and comfort to her children. She loved her children completely, but her affection for them was focused and specific, never cloying or babying. Anne Dittrick was fascinated by her children – she saw them as unique individuals, distinct from her such that she hesitated to use the word “proud”, because it seemed to take too much credit, to detract from her children’s own effort. Though certainly, my mom deserves credit for how she supported and taught us. She taught me to discern, to be careful in my thoughts and actions, to love unconditionally and to be focused in my attention and care toward others. Indeed, it was a focused care that she gave to her children, to her students, to all who came into her home and into her life.

 My mom’s house may not have reached the completion she imagined in terms of style and décor. She didn’t have all the things she wanted, though her house was full of beautiful things, chosen with great discernment. And then there were all the mundane things (the stuff of life) as well as the many personal mementos (all the paper, the objects and the personal effects) my mom held onto, whether they came from herself or her children or any other character in her life story. It has taken us years to parse through everything, and we’re still going through it all – an ongoing journey to determine what should be saved. The “things” are a particular complication in this wandering through reality and time. The “things” are left unresolved. But what is sure is that my mom made a home, a physical and a spiritual place where her family and her friends could find comfort and warmth, and that focused care and attention.

 The end of that vivid dream I had when I was 19 was about things, objects. In the dream, there was a mass of people who had just learned that the life they were living was not real, and that they needed to make a journey back to their origins, back to real life to begin again. It was a pilgrimage back to an original, true destination. They weren’t allowed to bring any physical things with them. I have an image of a young man in my dream making his journey, walking sadly down a path surrounded by a vast green field and dragging a small horse made of denim behind him (dreams are strange). He dragged the horse with one hand and with the other he held a spray bottle, full of a liquid that was rumored to make objects permissible to this mysterious and true destination. He sprayed and sprayed that little blue horse, but there wasn’t much hope.

What is the value in a thing, anyway? Well, my profession requires me to work with things and indeed to value them. And I do find power in objects, especially those objects that honor a person, a memory, or an important moment in time. But in the end, what is more permanent than a person’s belongings is the intangible power and influence a person has on others – the way a person makes another feel, the way a person loves. And for all this wondering about reality, this confusion over time and loss, this struggle to understand what difference a year or seventeen years make, there remains a very real love, and that’s something to hold on to. My mom’s love is forever real to me, and though I’m not always aware of it, though I’m not always sure how to use it, it is there in all that I do and all that I am. And for that I’m very, very lucky. Time continues to turn, and the years pass with new perils and new treasures. Spring returns and I remember that it is going to be all right.