Beautiful, moving, visceral writing - how I wish it were fiction, spun straight from the imagination, not real life. Your loss is so keen and so profound. We've heard for years that time heals all wounds. That the grief ebbs. I have found the opposite. We miss them more with every passing birthday, every holiday, every wedding they don't attend.

Dreams as time travel - yes!! You could start a new religion with this. Lately I've been reading about the three men of the mid-1800s who started three new sects that flourish all these years later. How did they do it? Mormons, Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses. More than a hundred years later, these "prophets" are still followed, despite obvious errors in their prophecies. E.g. April of 1878 came and went without the return of Jesus Christ. (I can hear the GPS voice: "Recalculating!") Charles Russell recalculated. In 1914, the long-awaited end of the Age of the Gentiles did not happen... He then stated that World War I was confirmation of biblical prophecies and the return of Jesus Christ would happen in 1918.
"Russell never lived to see the long-awaited return of Jesus Christ. Joseph Franklin Rutherford became Russell's successor, and the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society still exists today, although under the name coined by Rutherford, the Jehovah's Witnesses. It continued to use much of Russell's teachings, but also dismissed a portion of them as incorrect."

How do people with demonstrable FALSE beliefs get millions of people to believe them?
My dad's cousin died a few days ago. She had become a Jehovah's Witness. Our quaint rural community, so staunchly WASP (White, Protestant, conventional) has room for all sorts of preachers and parishioners. Mostly, they're "salt o' the earth,' good people...

And now I traipse back from the thickets to the trail, where you mentioned dreams and time travel, and a child dying in his mother's arms, and the way you write is so compelling, I thought, "So this is how those new religions get started. Someone eloquent, like @owasco, says something brilliant," and if they get enough positive feedback, they might get ideas of starting a new cult of fellow believers. Well, I don't see you doing this, @owasco, but you do have that gift, that eloquence that can launch revolutions and attract believers - even though Ecclesiastes warns us there is "nothing new under the sun."
I've lost three sisters and our father, but not my son, my only son, and I cannot even fathom the pain of losing yours so early in life. All the living he missed out on all the years he was ill. I am so sorry. We carry on, as stoics must, but some days, yes, the tidal wave of tears may take us by surprise. (It happened to me last night. Lent. That time of year...)