Funereal

In this dream I was with my mother. We were to perform a funereal ritual called the ???? for my father. (The word was very clear in my mind, even after awakening, but I can't recall it now.) We went to one church in Sacramento, and were directed to another one. I wondered why we just couldn't have called to find out where it was supposed to be. At the second church, we went down into a basement area and found the room, after walking through a bath-like area, perhaps suggesting baptismal fonts.

Apparently this was a kind of second funeral, performed several years after the death. My father died in 2000, but in the dream the event seemed closer in time. I found a small slip of paper on which my mother had written of her hardships taking care of my father in his illness. She talked of not having enough protein and having to chew multivitamins to get enough nourishment.  I began to weep, and the rest of the dream was basically me weeping. I felt guilty at not having helped my mother. At some point someone tried to comfort me.

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Now my mother helps to care for my sister, who has a rarer form of dementia that hits people in late middle age.  At the same time, she has my niece living there as well, with a caregiver who comes in, so the burden is not all on her. The emotion in the dream is very real to me, even though in real life my mother has dealt with tasks of caring for others quite well.  Between the time my father died and my sister was diagnosed with dementia, she voluntarily cared for several people not even related to her, as well as helping out her own parents.