Marcus Visits Me in Dreams

My deceased brother has visited many times in my dreams.  Most of them have been vision-like, in a Biblical sort of way.  He is usually wearing white, something like a Tai Chi uniform with the columned rows of ties across the front.  He is also barefoot or sometimes wearing leather walking sandals.

We once walked along the fairway behind Mom and Dad's house and he told me what Heaven was like.  He said his back felt better, and that there was no pain in Heaven.  Nana and Russel are there, along with other friends and family.  While I am with him, sometimes an image of him being held in the arms of Jesus or God flashes in my mind like a vision, and Marc would smile.  "Yeah," he said.  "It's like that."  These images are a lot like the drawings you might have seen in the religious tracts so common 30 years ago.

In some of them we have spoken, and it has been very much like it was when we talked when he was alive.  Sometimes when he appears we don't speak, and he flashes images to my mind.  Like that of him playing golf in Heaven, wearing his Tai Chi uniform.  He can drive the ball further in Heaven than he could here.

Recently I had another dream.  One that was different than the dreams I had right after he died.  In this dream, we met up outside the house we last shared on Golden Circle in Escondido.  I was happy to see him and he was happy to see me.  He was wearing a tan Tai Chi uniform, not white.  He said it was time we had a proper hug goodbye.  We embraced and I could feel him tense up a bit from the pain.  His back was hurting again.  I looked at him and he was standing with his hands on his hips, chin slightly elevated, dipping his knees as if trying, and failing, to get comfortable.  There was a little sweat on his brow and upper lip.

"How is your back?"

He said, "Not good."  He twisted his arms and shoulders to show me, and his back cracked all the way up.

"Isn't there no pain in Heaven?" 

"I'm not sure that's where I am," he said.

"What do you mean?  You mean you're still here on Earth?  Or that other place?"  I couldn't say the name.

"I'm talking to you, aren't I?"  He reached out and put both hands on my shoulders, something he would never do when he was alive.  "I think I'm stuck on Earth."

"Maybe your back is getting worse now because you're supposed to go to Heaven.  All the way."
He pressed his lips together and nodded.  He looked at nothing for a minute.  He had his hands on his hips and bobbed up and down a little.

He started looking around as if he trying to find something, something he lost or knew should be there but was not in pain sight.  He looked around like he was going to see a Stairway to Heaven, there in the driveway.  He looked across the driveway to another house and said, "Which one is taller, our house or that one?"

"I think that one," I said.
He didn't reply but walked over to the house and opened the garage.  A woman named Kathleen lived there and she was backing her car out of the garage.  Marc walked right through it like a ghost.  She never saw him.  It was then I thought that he wasn't all that stuck on Earth.  He was half-here, at the most. He entered the door that led inside.

A moment later, Marc was on the roof.  I had a crazy moment of dread that he was going to jump off the building and end his life again, like dying in the dream would jump-start his journey to Heaven.

"It's not high enough," I yelled.  "If you're trying to break your neck, you need to go to Oceanside."  This was said in the manner of dreams, and might seem a strange thing to tell a guy who was already deceased.  But Marc and I were once at the top of a 22 story apartment building in Oceanside, holding on to the railing and feeling the frantic wind blowing in from the ocean and across the coast, wondering in a manic, tequila-fueled rush what it would feel like to plummet those 22 stories to the earth.

Just how would it feel?  Would you enjoy the feeling by the end of the ride?  Or simply be scared?  We asked these questions and many more, and these questions seemed so sacred at the time.  We were being profound, on top of this building in Oceanside.  We were thinking of possibilities.  This possibility of dying.  There were so many possibilities out there, and dying was one of them.

Marc laid down on the ridge of the roof, along the terracotta tile.

"Is this high enough?" he asked.  But he wasn't talking to me anymore.  He was talking to Jesus.