Visions of Lynn

Is that you, Lynn? I blinked awake. I was lying in bed in my Texas home. Another dream. For months, I’d been plagued by vivid dreams— wood splitting, things coming apart, visions of my parents, and now my cousin Lynn. She’d appeared to me in a flash, like a cameo in a TV sitcom. A beautiful teenager, how she looked when I last saw her. She smiled at me. Then I woke up.

- Kathryn Haueisen

Things had been hard since my husband left, and I knew some dreams were God’s way of helping me heal. But the dream about Lynn was puzzling. I hadn’t seen her in decades, and we’d never been particularly close. Her parents divorced when we were both in grade school. She’d moved from Ohio, where I lived, to California with her mother. As teens, we saw each other only at family gatherings.

Our lives had gone in different directions. I went off to college. Lynn got married a week after graduating high school. She was a mother of two before I even walked down the aisle. For years, everything I knew about my cousin had come from my mother and grandmother.

One morning, in my late twenties, I was watching my daughters play when the phone rang. It was Mom.

“It’s Lynn,” she said. “She’s been in a car accident. She’s in the hospital. They think she’ll live, but she’ll probably never walk again.”

My breath caught in my throat. I was living in Ohio with my husband and children. Our lives were peaceful. How awful that Lynn’s life had been upended in an instant!