Now I lay me down to sleep....

The Room

My father was gone,

My brother and sister married and in homes of their own.

I, still living at home, still sleeping in my childhood bed.

Except for those night when I couldn't sleep,

Or move, or even breathe.

"Asthma," said one doctor;

"Not likely," said another, "Sleep paralysis," Hmmm.

So on those nights when everything stopped,

And the horror began,

I would struggle against the chains of sleep,

Until I could break free, into my mother's room

Where she slept alone, well, not quite alone,

Her terrier slept at the foot of her bed,

Underneath the pile of covers,

In the unheated upper floor of the house.

She still slept on "her" side of the bed,

And I would climb into the other.

Wordless, I would sleep there til morning came.

I remember the bed, with the dog, and a peppery smell.

Later on...

I would wake, or think I woke,

To the sound of my own cries:

Some monster, or dark figure of the night

Had inhabited my sleep.

My mind, awake, or misleadingly so, before my body,

With a single goal--to find that room.

Until fully awakening to the knowledge of loss:

There is no room, no refuge, no place to hide,

From the inevitability of grief.

Diagnosis: Terminal

She had asked for more weapons to fend off the enemy for another while. The oncologist sketched a circle, representing her head. He drew another circle, just inside the first. He used a few strokes of his pencil to shade in the area between the 2 circles. "The cancer cells," he explained, " are here, swirling around in the fluid layer outside the brain. If it were a ball, (tumor) we could treat it, but not in this area." Who could be haunted by anything worse?

Another myth shot down

After I resigned from teaching at Hoosic Valley, in an attempt to save my soul, I worked at a variety of jobs, not all better jobs than HVC, but invariably more interesting. For a period of time, I worked as a proctor for Civil Service Exams, usually administered at the college or Albany High or some such site. People with disabilities were allowed to take the tests, but the tests needed to be administered individually. Not too many were interested in that job, so I agreed to do it. One day I had to read the entire test to a blind woman, a rather boring assignment that took all of a Saturday, probably 6 hours or so. The woman told me that she had been deprived of her sight since childhood, but had compensated for her loss by developing her sense of hearing, saying she could identify, recognize, and remember the voice of anyone she'd met. After I'd finished reading her the exam, we bade each other goodbye and I went to hand in the exam, sign out, etc , taking about 15 minutes before I left the building. As I was going down the front stairs toward where I'd parked my car, I saw the woman at the bottom of the stairs, looking lost and alone. So I retraced my steps and asked her if she needed any help. She said yes, she would like to be shown the way to the bus stop. So I walked her to the bus stop, chatting with her on the way. We had bonded a little during that long, long exam session. Before she got on the bus, she thanked me and asked me who I was, and how I came to realize she needed help. She had no clue that we'd spent the last 6 hours together, with her listening to my voice for most of that time. I can't remember exactly what I told her, but I know it raised my level of skepticism about sensory compensation.

Dream Within A Dream

Words of praise,

Professions of love,

Ease of movement,

Sense of belonging,

Joy of being:

Gone forever it would seem,

But not so--

In life's recurring dream.

Pogo says....

We have seen the enemy and he is us.   I say I can see the future and it sucks. 

Finale

If there is an afterlife where questions are answered and issues resolved, everything will be all right.  If there is not, then at the end she felt deserted and hopeless because no one would help her.