My (Un)dead Mother

I know this sounds beyond tacky and horrible. I don't care. I'm real here and this is the realest way to put it.

I dream of my late mother very often. In each of these dreams, I'm aware of the fact that she's dead, and maybe as a consequence, she always appears as someone literally returning from the grave, sometimes partly decomposed, sometimes seeming like a zombie, sometimes only barely alive.

I'm wondering if there's something my subconscious is trying to tell me beyond the bare fact that my mother is dead and I'm aware of it even in my dreams of her.

Am I still not done with her? Am I unsuccessfully trying to bring her back from the grave to ask her something, to tell her something, to find out who she really was? The other night, I asked her, in my dream, all the while knowing she's dead, "Did you love me? Why didn't you protect me?" And her eyes met mine only for a moment, and she just cried.

Or was she always something like a zombie? Was she ever truly alive? Possibly raised by a narcissistic mother and then spending her whole life with a narcissistic husband, has she ever lived? Or was she just one of the living dead? For instance, last night I dreamed that I had to take her from the hospital room where she lay dead and bury her, and when I entered the room and looked at her already decomposing body, she was moving and looking at me. She only looked alive. But she wasn't.

I'm finding it increasingly hard to remember the lively, vivacious woman everyone knew. In our home, she was subdued and ghostly. Unreal.