Roll of the Dice: I’ll See You in My Dreams

I held my granddaughter for the first time today.

With a lifetime of all of seven days packed into her 5 pounds 7 ounces, she fell asleep in my arms. And as the fumes from my red-eye flight and morning rush ran out, I fell asleep too.

For maybe an hour, we slept that way, Nora in my arms, swaddled and breathing gently against my chest.

And now I’m sitting in a dark hotel room, staring at a blank screen that’s daring me to analyze a song about death.

When Nora’s mom was only eighteen months old, we took a family trip to Tokyo. Not long into the long flight home to Seattle, Casey fell asleep in my arms like her daughter would 23 years later. But an eighteen-month-old is a lot bigger and heavier than a one-week-old, and it didn’t take very long for that airplane seat to get pretty uncomfortable. My arms fell asleep, my bladder got full, and my stomach rumbled with hunger.

But for six hours, I held her while she slept on my chest, because it had been so long since she’d done it last that I thought this time might be the last time.

And it was.

When I woke up from my hour-long nap today, Casey was there sitting next to me, watching her newborn daughter sleeping soundly on her father. And as her husband took Nora from my arms, Casey reminded me of that flight home from Japan.

She doesn’t remember it, of course–she was too young. But she’s heard the story so many times that she feels like she does, except this time it didn’t come with a heard-it-all-before eyeroll or an indulgent smile.

She told me that she’s been thinking about that story every day over the past week. And that every time she holds her daughter, she does so as if it might be the last time.

You’d think it would be hard to appreciate a song like “I’ll See You in My Dreams” on a day when you greet a new life, but it surprisingly isn’t.

I’m not sure if it’s just me, or if every new grandparent feels this way, but there’s something unexpectedly life-altering about seeing your first grandchild for the first time. There’s a new person on the planet that literally carries pieces of you inside her, and when you meet her you realize that you may never get to see who she becomes. When Nora is Casey’s age, I’ll be the age my dad was when he died this summer.

Nora’s road is long, just starting, and seeming without end; mine likely has more miles behind me than in front of me. It’s a sobering thought.

But when Casey told me that she holds Nora as if every time might be the last, what crossed my mind at that moment was: Death is not the end. Casey will see me every time she holds her daughter, whether I’m around or not. And I bet she’ll teach her daughter that story too, and at least that one little piece of me will become part of her, too.

When I listen to “I’ll See You in My Dreams” tonight, I don’t hear Bruce’s voice or even my own. I hear my daughter’s voice singing it, and her daughter’s voice. And even though Bruce wrote it as as a song of heartbreak, remembrance and defiance, to me it’s now a song of comfort, life, and promise.

The road is long and seeming without end
The days go on, I remember you my friend
And though you’re gone and my heart’s been empty it seems
I’ll see you in my dreams

I got your guitar here by the bed
All your favorite records and all the books that you read
And though my soul feels like it’s been split at the seams
I’ll see you in my dreams

I’ll see you in my dreams when all our summers have come to an end
I’ll see you in my dreams, we’ll meet and live and laugh again
I’ll see you in my dreams, up around the river bend
For death is not the end
And I’ll see you in my dreams

Bruce writes from the perspective of the one left behind, and his song is laced with loss. He’s at the age when Death is a more frequent visitor, and his heart has been emptied, his soul torn.

And for the first two verses, the song’s title feels less like a promise and more like a haunting: I’ll see you in my dreams.

But when the chorus arrives, “I’ll See You in My Dreams” takes flight. Bruce shakes himself from his elegy and loses himself in reverie. The upside of losing someone you can’t ever forget is that you can’t forget them, so you never really lose them.

And like so many of the best of Bruce’s songs, we can distill “I’ll See You in My Dreams” into a single line: For death is not the end. If those closing words and notes on Letter to You were to be the last we’d ever heard from Bruce Springsteen, there could be no more fitting ones.

He sings them with increasing emphasis in every performance, starting with the song’s debut at last year’s Stand Up For Heroes event…

…and as succor for a reeling nation at the height of the pandemic, when he performed it with the E Street Band on Saturday Night Live.

And as he visited with his ghosts each night during his second Broadway run, Bruce closed each show with a tear-streamed promise that sometimes felt just as desperate as defiant.

But for me, “I’ll See You in My Dreams” isn’t desperate at all, and it doesn’t fill me with loss.

It fills me with life.

It reminds me that the road really is long, and that while it has an end, it still seems far enough away to enjoy the rest of the ride. It reminds me to make the most of every moment, even the quiet and ordinary ones. Because like I learned with my dad when I was a teenager, we rarely know which moments will be the ones that stick with us when they happen, and with our children and their children, we may never know at all.

So I apologize for the skip day yesterday; it took me a little longer than usual to write this one. I was spending the day in the guest room of my daughter’s dreams and building a new one in my granddaughter’s.

It’s a little snug and cozy right now, but it’ll grow.

Happy Thanksgiving.

I’ll See You in My Dreams
Recorded: November 2019
Released: Letter to You (2020)
First performed: November 18, 2020 (Colts Neck, NJ)
Last performed: September 11, 2021 (New York City, NY)

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