Aside from the fact that I have to pee every 2-3 hours in my sleep, there are also rare times like this when I am driven by a sudden inability to fall back to sleep.
As I shut my eyes at 2:30, a morbid thought hit me. What if, by some tortuous prank of nature, Jigs suddenly passes away? I look at him, snoring loud as a grizzly, caressing his bare belly in his sleep. We never really know. We simply evade the question and leave it to the facts of life: The length of our daily cardio routine, how many cigarettes we smoke in a day, what food we eat, the health history of the family, how often we engage in risky activities. Yet, even the most cautious of people gets caught in a red light, when fate itself decides that it’s time to take a hike somewhere else.
I remember patients we’ve had in hospitals before. A 35-year old female who developed difficulty of breathing in the middle of dinner, only to die in the ER upon arrival. A flabby middle-aged guy who, for hours during the nightshift, pestered us with his unending attempts to rid the oxygen mask off his face because it “irritated him”. The next minute, we were taking turns doing hand compressions on his chest. A family guy who was just smiling as we entered his room in the ICU for feeding, then suddenly went into a heart attack. All of them bid us goodbye without warning.
To some people in the field, they were just a bunch of acronyms and numbers. S/P CABG, G3P2, DOB, NPO, BP q30, COPD, CVA, sBRP, DNR. Their ECGs, a green current swimming in a small black box till it falls flat. But to me, they were people who used to lead lives, have families waiting for them at home, who used to be just like us – alive sometimes, other times, dead – before that witching hour started ticking to catch them off guard.
I look at his black drumset from across the bed as it glistened against the moonlight. Would I have the heart to put it away? What good do keepsakes have when they can’t literally bring the dead back to life? For how long will fate permit him to stay with me? God, if I only knew.
Worse comes to worst, I would give birth to a fatherless child, and an unerring nurse would ask me what name she should put on the ID tag. I could have her named Helena Helena –
Because it was what my husband would have wanted. Because he once said that it spelled our history. “Juliana Hatfield – your mommy’s favorite indie artist. Juliana, because it was her name when I met her, and it was because of that name that she became your mother.” Because we both agreed it was a name that was not pretentious nor too sophisticated.
And here I am, a 6-month pregnant woman crying unreasonably at 4am. Sheesh.
I guess what I am really trying to say is, we’re not the kind of couple who say I love you everyday. Most of the time, we sink into the ordinariness of life and simply forget. But this hour, as he sleeps, I look at him and go all Bruce Lee. “I don’t always say it, but I mean it everyday.”
It’s in every meal I cook, in every dirty plate I wash off. It’s in my palm as I hand you your meds every morning. It’s those moments that I clean cat and dog poop because you’re still asleep or nursing a hangover. It’s there when I seem not to notice you while I’m at work. It’s there as I look over your shoulder at night and pray that the witching hour doesn’t get you, so you’ll live long enough to be with us, me and Juliana, as she blooms to a beautiful, full-grown woman.
