Climbing the mountain...

Many people liken grieving to climbing a mountain, one you can't go around, one you can't avoid. And I had a number of dreams which reinforced that idea for me. The first occurred a few weeks after our son died. In this dream my wife and I were climbing a mountain together. The going was tough, much of it on our hands and knees. After a long and difficult struggle, we came to a spot where the trail leveled out a bit. We stopped and stared in awe at the range of tall, jagged peaks on the distant horizon. We knew we'd have to get to the other side of those peaks. Nina saw a different trail, one off to the left, which she was sure was a short-cut and easier way to go. She rushed down this path wiith me in pursuit as I urged her to slow down and turn back. Suddenly she came to the edge of a precipice and for a moment teetered dangerously close to falling off. She took my hand and eased her way back. We rested and talked, then returned to our original path.
To me, mountains and other elevated places in my dreams represented the spirit or spiritual goals. I took such dreams to mean that to heal I needed to grow spiritually. This dream in particular told me there were no short-cuts in the grieving process. Whatever we needed to go through, that's what we'd go through. At that time I may have been concerned about Nina's interest in psychic readings, something I thought could cause as much harm or more harm than good.
This dream also vividly depicted what we would be doing in the coming years, struggling together to deal with the loss of our son.