I know I’ve dreamt of it almost nightly since I discovered my mother is alive. These happier dreams have replaced the horrible nightmares I’d been having about her. In the new recurring dream, I’m reunited with my mother, and she’s just as she was before the disease overtook her. She’s young, vibrant, and beautiful. She’s everything I think she should have been, and nothing that she actually was. When we are reunited for the first time, she holds me and tells me she loves me, and I feel like everything is okay again. But then I wake up, and I know it is not. My life is the exact opposite of okay. Dad received a call yesterday from Maryland’s state police saying that mom’s description matches a Jane Doe who is currently in a coma in a Baltimore extended-care facility after being hit by a car five years ago. She had no ID on her, and no one has come forward to claim her. Police hypothesized that the woman is schizophrenic by witness accounts of how she was acting before she walked into rush-hour traffic in downtown Baltimore.
