Overshare

Phil had been everything to her: husband, best friend, a nurturing father to their two children and a great provider. Suddenly losing him after thirty-two years of marriage left Joan reeling. It’s not as though she had ever been truly stable. But that was another great thing about Phil. He had stood by his wife through the worst of it. Phil had always been the most understanding spouse when it came to Joan’s dream anxiety disorder. She had slid through a few good periods, but it was rare that she could make it a full year without the attacks of crippling anxiety which played havoc with her emotional life and led to the loss of several good jobs. Joan had even become agoraphobic for a while. These “idiopathic nightmares” had started when she was still a young woman, shortly after her marriage to Phil. The nightmares were all so similar. They placed Joan in unknown settings with total strangers, but the central situation was always the same: Joan knew she had killed somebody and had to dispose of the body. She had buried countless men and women in her dreams, some young, some old. She lived with the smells of the bodies, of spaded earth, of their blood and decay. This wasn’t only in her dreams. It invaded her waking life. She would have flashbacks to their faces, their terrible postmortem stares. She never saw herself doing the actual killing. The dreams always started after the fact. She had to hide the bodies of her victims away. She would wake with a tremendous sense of unearned guilt that would last for months after each dream. It was all so real that she would have to repeat to herself in her mind that she was…