Sleep
Pepper Scott
For many years before I met Terry, I lived what he called a “wild life.”
When I told him what my life had been like before him, he listened carefully and then gave it a name. Wild.
I suppose he had a point.
When I was teaching, my regular week looked something like this: teaching during the day, English classes for children on the weekends, and adult English classes in the evenings. I ran from one school to another, teaching back-to-back, often 14 to 16 hours a day.
Apparently, sleep was not part of my curriculum.
After I left teaching, my work changed, but the pace did not. I traveled three to five days a week for development programs, constantly moving from one place to another.
There was, however, one great constant through all those years.
Soccer.
I devoted three to five hours to watching it, which meant two or three matches a night. Because clearly, after working 14 hours, what I really needed was to stay up and watch another football match.
At one point, while doing my postgraduate work, I spent most nights in the black-and-white photography lab. I would finally leave for home around 3 AM, then show up at school again at 7 AM.
Looking back, I am not entirely sure when I thought I was supposed to sleep.
I was truly too busy to sleep.
Figure that!
After Terry and I got together, things improved somewhat, although I was still trying to build my work life from the ground up. For years, I had three jobs.
Then Terry had his first major downturn, the one that brought the swallowing problem, and life changed again.
For the next 19 years or so, I barely really slept.
Terry could not sleep much either because of the nightly pain. So I stayed awake, keeping an eye on him. We used to joke about it.
“We’ll sleep when we die.”
It was our way of making something impossibly hard feel a little lighter.
And then, eventually, I did sleep.
After Terry was gone, the exhaustion finally caught up with me. I suppose two decades of running on almost nothing had been quietly keeping a very large tab.
My body eventually decided it was time to collect.
I started sleeping, but it turned out that sleeping and being able to sleep are two entirely different things.
I am a very light sleeper. Apparently, my hearing is far too good for my own good. I can hear everything inside the house and everything outside it. A tiny sound in the middle of the night can send my brain into full investigation mode.
Was that the refrigerator?
A bird?
The wind?
Something outside?
Or perhaps just a floorboard expressing an opinion?
As I write about it, I realize that sleep is actually quite complicated.
We spend so much of our lives trying to get enough of it, and then, when we finally have the time, we discover that our bodies have their own ideas about the matter.
Terry would have laughed about this.
He would probably have reminded me that after all those years of saying we would sleep when we died, I had finally been given the opportunity to sleep.
And, naturally, I had to make it difficult.
Some things, apparently, never change.
I can clearly hear Terry saying, "After a lifetime of being awake, here she is, still awake."
