Night, Night

“For the final time, NIGHT,” my mom used to admonish me as a boy when for what she called “the umpteenth time,” she would plead, “Would you just go to sleep?”

Getting me to sleep must have been a long order for Mom.

Often, Dad would be brought in like the relief pitcher in a ballgame that had gone bad.

His stern words, “Get to sleep,” weren’t meant to be comforting nor sleep enhancing. They meant, “If you can’t sleep, then just lie there and shut up.”

And so I would lie still in the silence, listening for the late night train in the distance to pass through my hometown, Altus, Oklahoma.

Now, years later, just a few weeks ago, I found that the roles have almost reversed: I was the one urging Mom and Dad to get to sleep.

Dad had carefully placed the sheets on the couch, then he kept worrying that I had not tucked them in properly. I was quartered in the room separating Mom and Dad’s bedrooms in their assisted living unit.

“Let’s just go to bed and get some sleep,” I suggested for “the umpteenth time.”

“We’d better start heading that way,” Dad once again agreed.

But “heading that way,” I learned, was a more involved process than I had assumed.

Mom is 94 and Dad is 92. It takes longer to get places, even to bed.

It takes some time just to think about getting places before the movement is even initiated to get there.

Time and again I would wake Dad, reminding him to start getting ready for bed.

Just a few weeks ago, Dad, who has cancer, had been in a skilled nursing unit and was separated from Mom.

Recently, they were reunited in the same unit.

One evening, about 8:30, he reflected with a gleam in his eye. “About now, I would start that long, lonely journey down the hallway to the ‘other place,’” he said, referring to the skilled nursing unit.

“Now, I get to stay right here with your mother,” he proudly proclaimed, as if he had come back to rescue his bride.

“Maybe that’s why he’s in no hurry to get to bed,” I thought. “He just enjoys being together in the same room with her.”

His bedroom is on one end of the unit, hers on the other. They watch TV in between naps in the living room area.

That’s where I am, on the couch.

Once, just after I had finally told them good night for what I thought was the last time and was drifting off into a deep sleep, Dad woke me: “Just checking to make sure you can sleep on that couch,” he hollered from his room, as I bolted upright.

I lay back down in the silence, listening for a train to pass through Lubbock, TX.

None.

Then, what I heard next worked better than Dad’s “Get to sleep,” when as a child, I was a sleepless in Altus.

I had gotten up to get a glass of milk, after Dad, wanting to make sure I could sleep, had awakened me.

“Night, Babe,” he shouted, calling Mom by the pet name he had given her untold years before.

I glanced toward his room.

He was waving to her from his room.

“Night,” Mom said, waving back to him from her room.

“We can’t hug, but we can wave ‘night-night’ to each other,” Dad explained, noticing that I was looking on.

Back on the couch, I heard no sound of a train.

I didn’t need one.

I was soon fast asleep, comforted by the evidence of a love whose bond spans two rooms and echoes down the halls of eternity.