dream

I had this really weird dream that made me cry, and I am having a hard time getting it out of my head. I dreamed that I was in my Grandmother's old house with my daughter. My great-Grandmother was still alive and living in the house. I was showing my daughter this book that had an elephant's trunk attached to a squeeze bulb. It was like a board book with a squeeze bulb elephant head that inflated and extended the trunk. It was my favorite book when I was a kid, and I had given the book to my Great-Grandmother. Now my daughter was playing with it, squeezing the bulb and being as enchanted as I once was. Then my daughter claimed the book with a declarative, "I want it. I want to keep it." My Great-Grandmother said to me, "Go ahead and let her have the book. She can keep it." And this made me cry. I am not sure whether I was crying because my child is so possessive and insensitive to the boundaries of others or whether I was so sad because my Great-Grandmother didn't need the book anymore because she was going to die, and she knew it. It was a little of both.
Now in real life, my great-Gramma Lucile has been dead for twenty years, and I did name my daughter after her. It was my Grandmother who gave away possessions in her last months of life because her terminal lung cancer had been diagnosed. So why was I so conflicted about my daughter wanting to possess a little piece of them?