Orbit
Dad fell late at night a couple weeks ago, and I've been sleeping at my parents' house ever since, putting to good use the baby monitor I bought with unaccustomed foresight in December when he was first enrolled in hospice. I'd bought the monitor at Target along with an extra blanket for Dad, and in the process got caught up in the Great Data Breach of 2013. But the monitor was such a useful purchase that any lingering anger at being hacked has dissipated. I was overdue for a new credit card, anyway.
The monitor has a static filter that enables you to screen out extraneous noises and hear only baby’s (or in this case, Dad’s) voice. I don’t use the filter. Since I can’t count on Dad to remember to summon me at the witching hour, I’ve come to depend on those extraneous noises-namely, the sound of the sickbed creaking as he rises with difficulty from it, his walker clicking as he yanks it into place. You could say I sleep with one ear cocked.
A few nights ago, around 4:00 am, I intercepted him at the bathroom door, gait belt slung over my shoulder like a bandoleer. “Bill! How on earth did you hear me?” he demanded. I can hear everything, I replied evenly, and it's no use trying to duck me. “I can hear you uncapping your water. I can hear you unzipping your Kindle.” He chuckled a bit, more relieved than annoyed to know I had his back.
I sleep on the family room sofa, a room away from his. Our heads are probably less than ten feet apart, but the solidity of the adjoining wall and the weird distancing effect of the monitor are such that I might be a technician at mission control, and Dad a slumbering astronaut orbiting the moon. It’s an odd sensation to lie on the sofa and fall asleep-asleep being an elastic term, of course-to the unsteady rhythms of a breath unstilled since 1921.
As for the moon, last Sunday’s threw elongated shadows on the patio just outside the family room. Everything glowed, even the concrete. I stepped outside in bare feet and peed on the lawn so as not to wake Mom or Dad (and to do my bit for water conservation, there being a drought and all). The generous moonlight silvered the edges of an overgrown basket of petunias hanging from the veranda, giving it the look of a phosphorescent and many-tentacled sea creature adrift in dark waters. A night bird sang from deep in the canyon just beyond the yard.
Twenty-fourteen will be remembered as the year my life imploded. I’m red-eyed and headachy much of the time. I rarely see friends anymore, and even a trip to the dentist seems like a vacation. Uninterrupted reading and writing are things of the past. Dad and I bicker (We laugh, too). But it’s no exaggeration to say I wouldn’t trade these many months with him for anything. All I would trade, and I would trade it in an instant, is the suffering he endures without complaint, the pain that no palliative drug can touch.
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