Night musings

Did I always sleep so badly? Or is it a function of having been ill that makes me reluctant to relinquish my grasp on consciousness? While I've always been a light sleeper - a field mouse sneezing in a field in the next county can wake me - I don't recall having been prone to wandering around the house in the early hours of the morning, making cups of tea, too tired to read, too jumpy to sleep.

It all began, I think, in my mother's last few weeks of life; night after night, I'd lie, fully clothed, in the dark, waiting for the phone to ring and the nurse at the other end of the line to tell me to come into the ward as quickly as possible. And then, there were the nights trying to sleep in the uncomfortable chairs in the "relatives' room" while my mother fought to survive. Then, finally, the nights at the bedside, waiting...

So, now, I wake in the hours between midnight and dawn, suddenly, and with my mind rerunning those last fifty-seven days. My own, more recent, experience of being a hospital patient doesn't even register; my fear then so much less than my fear for my frail and helpless mother. My own case did not disturb me half so much. It seems that the peril of others causes more tears and trauma than the proximity of one's own demise.

Having had a minor brush with eternity, my thoughts on waking in these dark hours are constant, filled with horror that the end could be as undignified as what I witnessed in the noisy silence of an intensive care unit.