Gately dreams Mrs. Waite and Death — "As Death’s explanation of Death goes…"
As Death’s explanation of Death goes on Gately understands really important vague stuff more and more, but the more he understands the sadder he gets, and the sadder he gets the more unfocused and wobbly becomes his vision of the Death’s Joelle sitting nude on the pink plastic ring, until near the end it’s as if he’s seeing her through a kind of cloud of light, a milky filter that’s the same as the wobbly blur through which a baby sees a parental face bending over its crib, and he begins to cry in a way that hurts his chest, and asks Death to set him free and be his mother, and Joelle either shakes or nods her lovely unfocused head and says: Wait.
Context
The dream's last movement and the scene's last line: understanding blurs into infancy, the dreamer becomes the baby in the crib looking up at the mother-Death he's just been told about, and his plea gets the one-word answer that puns on the dead neighbor's name (Mrs. Waite) — and is honored, since Joelle appears in the flesh at his bedside at the top of scene 166. The crib-blur pairs across the section break with Hal's Kevin Bain dream (165). The text reads "the Death's Joelle" — carried as written.