From Every Sleep and Every Fall

For my father

“Not whether,” Mother says, “but when.” (“And how,” she could have added, but she doesn’t.) The point is, Dad is eighty-seven. Something’s going to happen.

He fell on Tuesday — that was what she called to tell me — right beside the bed, sometime past midnight. Dehydrated from a stomach bug, ions out of kilter, too weak to rise and too confused to find the pull cord in the dark to summon help, lacking means to rouse his wife of sixty-four years from sleep both sound and soundproof with her hearing aids turned off.

Two days of I-V fluids set him right again this time. By the time I heard about it he was sitting in the chair beside the hospital bed in comfort: coffee black and Wall Street Journal.

He’d tell me later that night was “unpleasant, yes,” but show more interest in the puzzle clues of how it came to happen than complaining. No denial, but why dwell on miseries successfully endured?

Getting really old, I think, takes courage: to rise from every sleep and every fall, recalling strength, diminished now, recalling clarity of thought, evasive now, to waken ever into gratitude, in love with life, not doubting or discounting what must yet be suffered, lost, surrendered, but eager nonetheless to countenance familiar beauties, like that ancient restless wanderer, to seek for something more, a bringer of new things, to be a mind still capable of wonder and surprise.

That kind of courage. Not afraid of something happening, already happening, the slow fall into dreamless sleep, but rising yet again and yet again to taste the sweetness of the light.

This was first published in Camel City News.

My father died — of old age as much as anything — in January of 2019 at the age of 91. My mother, who had been in better health for years and seemed certain to outlive him, developed ovarian cancer two years earlier and died at 86 five weeks after being diagnosed.