My hometown friend Dwight died in January of 2005. I miss his emails and being able to talk to him on the phone.
Dwight was probably the brightest of any of our age group growing up, and deserved a bigger life than he got even if he never expressed any real regrets to me. I wish I could see him again.
A strikingly imaginative thinker, he was an amazing fellow who loved theater and movies, and I feel confident he would have made a big splash on Broadway or Off Broadway and maybe even in movies. He also loved to draw. You can read about him here, in Lypsinka’s blog item about Dwight, which serves as a kind of eulogy. He was a classmate and friend of the young man who would become Lypsinka while they attended Millsaps College. Scroll down to Two Girls on Broadway. It’s a fitting memory of Dwight with more clearly described recollections than I could muster.
Two nights ago, however, I had a wonderful dream about Dwight, courtesy of the wonders of Sustiva, one of the side effects of which is vivid, fantastic dreams. At the time I began taking that very effective life-saving drug I had either stopped dreaming or always forgot them altogether, which amounts to the same thing. A person needs dreams, and now I have them every night and remember having them even if I can’t summon more specific details.
In that brightly lit dream Dwight was healthy, trim, happy and his creativity had blossomed. I can’t remember visualizing his face but I knew that it was Dwight. His tiny house in Kosciusko, Mississippi, had been replaced by an amazing sort of Zen garden affair with geometric shapes and concentric circles formed of rocks and some sort of rocky blocks. (The dreams I have are wild, surrealistic visions but if I remember them at all it is usually only barely.) I do not know what Dwight “did” in this dream, only that he was happy and successful doing it. Generous of spirit, open-hearted and at peace with himself and the world, and embracing life with uninhibited freedom — and characteristically wry. Our surroundings in this dreamscape seemed to be grayish, like the stones but not colorless. He seemed to be wearing a suit, which is odd because Dwight was nothing if not colorful and unconventional. I never saw him wear a suit in life, he wasn’t the type. My last visual memory of him is in overalls. If he had worn a suit-coat, it would have been personally stylized and as brilliant as Joseph’s.
Always a large person who may or may not have struggled with his weight but in any case eventually either accepted or embraced it, Dwight most likely died alone in a hospital room in Mississippi, from one of the numerous infections that increasingly plagued him by that time in his life.
Whatever the circumstances of his final days, from his communications with me he never lost his sense of humor, his unparalleled wit or his creative thirst. As unlikely as it may or may not be, I like to think this dream was Dwight’s way of letting me know he is happy in whatever form his new realm has taken, assuming of course that there was, or rather is, a life to come after this one.
