Up All Night

It started around midnight as a trembling in the bed. Then my husband, Fred, started thrashing around as if he were in pain. When he slipped half off the mattress, I held my breath. After pulling himself back up, Fred lay on his back and laughed.

“Are you all right?” I asked, rubbing his shoulder.

“Get a load of those hats,” he said.

“What hats?”

He pointed to the blank wall. “There. That one’s pink.”

“Oh. Pink’s good. I like pink.” I rolled over and tried to get back to sleep, but then it happened again.

At 1:45 a.m., I got out of bed and retreated to the guest room. The night before, I’d stuck it out until 4 a.m.

This nighttime ritual has been going on for months. One night Fred turned to me and asked, “Who are you?” Last week I woke to find him scrambling toward the wall behind the bed, as if he were swimming.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“There’s someone there. I have to get to them.”

And yet in the morning, sipping his juice and reading the paper, he remembers none of it. If I tell him what he said and did the night before, his eyes widen in surprise: “I did?”

I am losing my husband to Alzheimer’s disease. Someday soon he will move for good into that halfway state between waking and sleeping. For now, though, his hallucinations occur only at night. Not that there aren’t daytime problems: he can’t work the tv remote or the telephone, can’t remember what day it is, doesn’t know where I’m going when I head out the door for work.

We no longer make love when we go to bed, but sometimes he rolls toward me, and I slide into his arms and feel his warmth. He kisses me and rubs my back, my shoulders, my belly. And then we move to our separate sides. After a minute I hear him snoring.

Last night, while he was asleep, tears filled my eyes. I wiped them away and forced myself to think about the movie I had seen on tv and what I might make for dinner this week. I started to fall asleep. And then the trembling beside me began.

Sue Fagalde Lick
South Beach, Oregon

I went away to college believing a full night of uninterrupted sleep was my God-given right. I lay seething in bed as my talkative (and lonely, I now realize) neighbor on the other side of the thin dorm wall blathered on the phone all night. I was happy when she flunked out.

Over the years my children’s nighttime needs have taught me to relax my expectations about a full night’s sleep. My first child was unable to nurse lying down or in the dark until she was two months old, so I’d bring her to the living room several times a night to feed her. It was exhausting, and I resented my husband for sleeping soundly — in fact, I resented everyone in the world who was asleep. Then, during one of our 2 a.m. living-room visits, my daughter looked at me and smiled. Her first smile. Suddenly it was wonderful to imagine that we were the only two people awake in the world.

Ten years later I’m four and a half months pregnant and can’t sleep because of what I tell myself is uterine-ligament pain. This is my fifth baby, though, and I should know it’s not ligament pain. I should know this pain.

I feel something let go inside me, and I make my way to the bathroom, where the warm amniotic sac slips into my hands. Kneeling on the bathroom floor, I yell for my husband.

Within the bag of fluid I see the curve of a torso, an arm, a leg, an unmoving white body suspended in dark water. This is a shocking, horrible joke. What can I do? My midwife is unreachable.

Then I realize that this is my time with him. In the morning we will have to tell everyone, including our other kids. In the morning I will probably be mad with grief. But right now I pull myself together. We take pictures of our son. We make tiny footprints and handprints. I bend his perfect little knees, ankles, wrists, and fingers, feel the bumps of his spine and the swelling in his head and neck. I memorize him, kiss him, sit in a rocking chair and hold him to my chest all night long.

Chrissy Anderson
Culp Creek, Oregon

On a busy night the calls come at 12:25, 3:35, 4:15, 6:00, 6:45. They are almost always calling about pain or shortness of breath, and they need my permission to take another dose of morphine. At six o’clock this morning I talked with a hospice patient who was crying from pain, despite having had morphine a few hours earlier. She had forgotten her routine medications the day before, and her pain had escalated out of control in the night. I told her to take a higher dose; the worst that could happen was the medication would make her sleepy. I use the word sleepy a lot when I am trying to reassure patients it’s ok to take strong doses of narcotics. Of course, I am also trying to reassure myself. So far no one has overdosed from taking my advice, but I worry at times.

My co-workers and friends ask how I can think clearly about the instruction I am giving when I’ve just been awakened in the middle of the night. I tell them that after thirteen years of hospice nursing, I am well versed in handling routine problems. The hard part is deciding whether to go back to sleep after hearing a patient with what we call “agonal respirations”: the ragged, gurgling pattern of breathing that occurs within hours of death. Sometimes the caregivers call, frightened and exhausted, and I realize that they have been up all night, too.

It can feel like a minor form of torture to keep dragging myself out of bed and away from my husband. I bring my pillow and the phone to the other bedroom and doze as best I can. The sleep deprivation has gotten more difficult as I’ve gotten older. Sometimes, when I’ve just started to fall asleep and the phone rings, I feel like screaming. Then I remind myself that my lack of sleep is nothing compared to what my patients and their families are going through.

Mary Johnson
Pleasant Hill, Oregon

The summer I was ten years old, I was sent to visit my aunt and uncle at their lake house. One afternoon my uncle, my cousins, and I went swimming. After we’d trudged back to the house, my aunt explained that she’d been called in to work a graveyard shift. My uncle would be in charge.

I went to my bedroom and was changing out of my soggy bathing suit when my uncle came in. He was naked. I had never seen a naked man before and was unsure where to direct my gaze. Smiling, he scratched himself and said he felt some sand in his crotch. “Can you see any sand?” he asked, and, moving his penis aside, he motioned for me to come closer. I nervously stepped forward: no, I couldn’t see any sand. With a grin, my uncle said thanks and left the room. I stared at the empty doorway, confused. No one in my family ever walked around naked. Something didn’t seem right.

Later that evening, my uncle — now fully clothed — spooned out steaming bowls of macaroni and cheese as if nothing were amiss. I had a funny feeling in my stomach, though, and the ravenous appetite I’d worked up earlier was gone.

That night I tossed and turned in bed, unable to sleep. Finally I got up to go to the bathroom, tiptoeing down the hallway by the glow of a night light. I left the bathroom door open, and after I’d flushed the toilet, I turned to find my uncle standing in the narrow doorway, naked again. He asked if I needed a hug. No, I said, and I stepped around him, went back to my room, and closed the door.

In bed I pulled the covers up to my chin. A clock ticked somewhere in the house. I stared at the crack of light underneath the door, where I saw a shadow pause briefly — and then move away.

Name Withheld

My husband and I were stuck in Saigon, Vietnam, waiting for a visa so we could bring our newly adopted three-month-old son, Ari, home. He had been crying a lot and seemed uncomfortable. Several times I asked my husband and my mother, who was with us, if we should take him to the international clinic, but they kept saying he was fine. My husband is a teacher, self-assured and knowledgeable; my mother is an anesthesiologist who had raised two children. I listened to them.

After three weeks of dragging its feet, the United States government finally granted us a visa. The night before we were to leave Vietnam, Ari woke up crying every ninety minutes as if in pain. We couldn’t figure out why. Each time, he’d eventually go back to sleep, leaving us to worry and wait for the next bout. Worn out and anxious, I screamed, “I knew we should have taken him to the clinic!”

My husband said, “If it was so important to you, you should have taken him!”

Although I was angry, I knew what he’d said was the truth. I had been waiting for approval and support, when in fact I needed neither.

Without a word, I dressed and got Ari’s and my things ready. When, at 3 a.m., Ari woke crying again, I slipped him into his carrier and told my husband that I was going to the clinic. Unless he heard from me, I’d see him at the airport at 6 a.m.

At the clinic the doctor said that Ari had bronchiolitis, a lung infection, and could not travel in an airplane until it cleared up. Apparently, the thin oxygen in an airplane can be deadly to a baby with the disease. I called my husband and told him the news. Ari got better with treatment, and we left a week later.

I think of that night as the moment I became a mother first, a wife and daughter second.

Michaele G.
Port Chester, New York

It’s the last day of our honeymoon in Italy. Our plane leaves tomorrow morning at 6 a.m., so Kyla and I decide that, instead of getting a hotel for the night, we’ll eat a late dinner, walk around the city, catch the last bus to the airport, and sleep in the terminal. 

When we arrive at the airport at midnight, rain is pouring down, and the place is empty. I volunteer to stay awake and keep watch over our luggage until 3 a.m.; then Kyla will relieve me until check-in at five. Kyla lies down on a tattered couch with her head on my lap. I stroke her hair, and within moments she’s asleep.

Except for the sound of rain and thunder, the airport is silent: no planes taking off or landing, no buzz of humanity rushing this way and that. I study Kyla’s face and notice wrinkles starting to form near her eyes and a couple of gray hairs. All of a sudden it hits me that I’m in this for the long haul. It took me eight years to propose, but now all my fear of commitment seems to dissipate.

It’s not a gondola ride through the Venice canals, or a sunset stroll along Lake Garda, or late-afternoon lovemaking in Verona that finally makes me feel comfortable as a married man. No, it’s staying up all night on an old, stained couch in an empty airport with my new wife asleep on my lap.

Paul Grafton
Santa Barbara, California

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