The Suitcase I Never Found

A dream, a door, and the permission I didn't know I was waiting for

Lee and I were in line to get on a plane. A long line, winding down a long hallway. I discovered I didn’t have my suitcase — I’d left it at home. Go find it, he told me. I’ll be waiting for you.

I couldn’t find the suitcase. What I found instead was chaos — a room that looked ransacked, clothes and papers and furniture thrown everywhere. I asked a few workers if they’d seen a suitcase. No, they said, while in the next room over, they swept up debris that had been thrown around like it belonged there.

I walked through it looking for that suitcase, and slowly realized I would miss the plane — and Lee — if I didn’t get back to the line. I had no phone, no way to tell him I was coming. So I ran.

The line was gone. They had boarded. The plane had taken off. Lee with it.

That’s when I woke up.

Usually dreams fade by midmorning. This one didn’t. Hours later, I could still see it — the rooms, the chaos, the dread of realizing I’d missed him.

And here’s the strange part: I wasn’t sad about it. I felt calm. As if — and I’m not someone who believes in messages from the other side — Lee was sending me something of a love note. I’m where I am now, and it’s okay. The chaos I found in that ransacked room felt like an exact replica of what caregiving felt like, year after year — one disordered scene bleeding into the next, nothing where it should be, no time to put it back. Lee was telling me it was time to leave that chaos behind.

💡There’s a scientific viewpoint to this. Research shows that dreams are not just random noise; they serve vital functions for emotion regulation, memory consolidation, and problem-solving. Rather than mystical prophecies, the “messages” in dreams are your subconscious mind reconstructing your daily experiences and amplifying buried feelings to help you process waking life. Scientists have found that dreams blend memories with imagined scenarios to help you navigate future waking concerns.

The suitcase metaphor isn’t new to me. I wrote about one before, in a Letter to Myself about a trip to the Adriatic — The Suitcase by the Door. In it, I told an earlier version of myself to reach out, to communicate, to tell my people what was actually happening instead of carrying it alone. So when this suitcase went missing in the dream, I had to ask: what is it trying to teach me this time?

Melissa Rider Carson, writing in From Above the Canopy, stopped me cold recently with a question: Are you holding off on closing a door because of what you’d leave behind, and missing what might be waiting on the other side of it?

That door is my old life. The joyous years. The caregiving years. The grieving years. All of it holds me — or at least delays me — from whatever comes next. There are real opportunities in front of me, if I’m willing to reach for them. But there’s a tug from the other side of that door. Something that keeps me standing in the hallway instead of walking on.

I am approaching a place in my story that many Tender Warriors are not. I won’t leave any warriors behind — we are in this together. But we all walk different paths. Some warriors are in the trenches of caregiving, day to day battles with the inevitable, and I am there to hold you up in any way I can. Others are in the beginning days and are terrified of the future. I am on the other side, in every way, and charting a different course now, very much informed by this recent season in life.

Seth Godin writes about the doors we never try, simply because no one told us they were unlocked. He suggests that instead of waiting for certainty, we act as if — just for now — to find out what’s actually possible. Sometimes we hold ourselves back for no better reason than not knowing we had a choice at all.

Doors again. And the suitcase.

In the dream, I never found it. I wasn’t supposed to. It needed to be left behind.

Lee wasn’t calling me onto the plane. He was telling me to stay off it. To turn around. To go live.

Explore, learn, push the boundaries I’ve been standing just behind. Open those doors.

If not now, when?

Vicki.