Recurrent Dream and More (9 cents)

I have had the same dream a number of times. It is about my grandmother, who lived 100 years and died in 1972. The dream is that in fact, she hadn't died, but had been living the whole time and I just forgot about her, until I found her in a nursing home, very old, but still alert. How I found the nursing home, I don't know, but a felt terrible, as you would imagine, that she had been left alone all these years, that we thought she had died, and who knows what she was thinking about us. But she seemed fine and happy to see me, and not at all mad at me or anyone else, and I knew I couldn't let this happen again. That's the dream. Quite spooky, and who knows what it could mean.

But yesterday, I am reading an article called "Keeping alive the Memory" about the Weissensee Cemetery in Berlin, the largest Jewish cemetery in the city, with about 115,000 graves, still in use. The cemetery, located in former East Berlin, has opened its archives to the public, and now is getting a number of visitors from other parts of the world. The article was in the November 2005 Atlantic Life.

I quote: "The elderly lady from Brazil was one such visitor - at least she thought she was. Borgmann [caretaker of the archives] describes how the woman arrived at the cemetery hoping to find the grave of an aunt. Less than an hour later, she was standing stupefied in front of the headstone of the grandmother she thought had been killed by the Nazis. The death of her grandmother had weighed on the consciences of the family for more than six decades. They had left her behind when they fled to Palestine. Using the archive, Borgmann had been able to find out the grandmother had survived the war, and lived until she was 93 years old in a Jewish nursing home in Berlin."

I assume that the lack of possible communication was very much exacerbated because the grandmother was caught in Communist East Germany, but nevertheless, the story seems impossible, doesn't it? But then, so does my dream which, each time it recurs, seems as real as can be.