Sleep

My father is staying with me these last few days. Sick with a cold of some kind he insists on sleeping in the back room, doesn’t want to disturb me with coughing fits deep into the night. Of all my father’s health concerns, his chest has never really alarmed me. Even though he was in the hospital for Christmas a decade ago, even though a common cold quickly turns into atypical pneumonia doctors take weeks to diagnose, it was only recently I became worried.

It is because he’s talking to me, confiding in me. He went to the doctor because he was waking at night, evey night with chills, fevers, sweating. The doctor looked him over and he tells me that he told the doctor that his tremor wouldn’t get him, neither would the disease his father had, it wouldn’t be his heart or cancer, he told the doctor that it would be his lungs that would catch up with him. I am so fucking horrified by this. I cannot conceive of my father dying and going on. I would like to make an official request to the universe that I get him, in acceptable health, for at least another 25 years. That is what I want.

Earlier he had dozed off a couple of times watching TV with me, this is common. He pushes himself for me, I know. Finally he says goodnight and goes into my cold back room where I’ve laid a sheet across the couch and place a quilt I made, my first quilt, folded in half across it. And a couple of hours later I’m ready for bed and I hesitate, know how cold it is back there, I can hear him snoring. I finally decide to cover him with a second quilt and quietly creep into the backroom, carefully, without making a single small sound.

He is deep asleep, still. I slowly raise my arms and begin to lower the quilt, as if onto a sleeping bear. And the moment the edge of the quilt brushes his calf, buried below a sheet and the first quilt he is up like a jackrabbit. Literally is upright in a split second and I jump and immediately apologize to his disoriented and darkened face, just a little scared and more regretful. He is fine, he says no problem, he says he is warm and I leave.

I go to bed myself with a pit in my stomach. I’m not sure why. I wonder what he dreams about. I wonder how long this will last, will he jump from his sleep when he’s 70? Will he propel cats across the room from a deep slumber? Will this always be here? I snuggle deeper into my own quilts, shiver from the chill in this winter air and think hard on light things, fireflies and dusk in late spring.