She wasn’t torturing me on purpose. She probably never even read about “sleep deprivation torture.” My guess is that she knows nothing about the various stages of sleep. However, she was a master at the process of waking me just as I was slipping into the deeper sleep we all need in order to function effectively in our waking world.
I was at her home because her husband (87 years old) loves to hunt deer. His sons, his grandson, and he have an annual ritual that starts weeks before the opening day of deer hunting season. They have a cabin in the woods. It has a big propane gas tank next to the shack. Inside there is a gas range, a gas refrigerator, a small table with four chairs, and four double beds fashioned as bunk beds. “It can sleep 16 if you sleep double on the double,” her husband jokes.
To say that it is a simple shack is to flatter the word “simple.” Yet, year after year they clear the fallen branches from the yard, rake the dirt that surrounds the cabin, stock the cooler with a variety of beer and soda, stock the refrigerator, and prepare meals and “get ready” for their outing.
My mother is 92 years old. She began suffering from dementia a long time ago. We noticed it was pretty well developed when she was about 80. So, it’s been 12 years of watching her cognitive world shrink, even as her emotional world has seemed to blossom. She has never been sweeter, full of compliments and gratitude for visits and attention. “You are such a good son, Richard,” she says to me as I prepare her a sandwich for lunch. “I love it when you are here, son,” she’ll bubble at no particular time, for no particular reason. Her dementia is closing one of her worlds while opening another rich world of appreciation for what is here now.
Her husband is not my father. My father died 40 years ago. My mother married Dick after an appropriate period of mourning. They’ve lived on a lake in mid-Michigan ever since, raising one of his two sons when he lost his wife to cancer at roughly the same time my mother became a widow. As my mother’s illness progressed, he has gone through the stages of grief many times. He was an “old school” husband who expected his wife to have dinner on the table at 6 p.m., to wash the clothes, clean the house, and basically take care of him. Slowly my mom has been unable to do these tasks that once defined their relationship. Each loss was greeted with denial, anger, negotiations, depression and acceptance… until the next loss.
To his great credit, Dick has picked up every inch of slack. He shops, he cooks, my mom washes up, he washes clothes, and, in general, the tables have quite literally turned, to where Dick is now the caretaker of my mother. I pray with gratitude constantly for this gift of Dick in my mother’s life.
As she’s become more forgetful, Dick has managed all of her health care. Every three months he fills out all the Medicare forms that are required for her receipt of her prescription medication. Weekly he fills two “pill-organizers” – one for her AM pills and one for her PM pills. Twice a day he reminds her to take her pills. Twice a day she resists – “I already took my pills,” “I don’t need those pills,” and, more existentially, “how do these pills know what to do when they are inside my body?” It is one of the sad realities of my mom’s current universe that the one person who sacrifices the most for her well-being is the one to whom she gives the least gratitude. We always hurt the ones we love.
As October turns to November, my brother, sister, my sister’s oldest daughter, and I make our plans to stay with mom while Dick goes deer hunting. This year, my niece stayed the day before deer season opened so the men could be at the tree line, pointing their rifles into the harvested corn field at the crack of dawn on opening day. She and two of her three children spent Wednesday and Thursday at Mom’s. On Friday my brother and I took shifts. I still work full time, so I couldn’t arrive until after work–and the two hour drive from work–on Friday evening. Michelle, my niece, had to leave earlier on Friday. Mike, my brother, filled in the gap. Friday evening Mike, Mom, and I went to dinner together. Afterward, Mom and I returned to her home.
Michelle had given me a head’s up about the sleeping options. Dick and Mom sleep in a room with two twin beds. Upstairs there are two double beds in two separate bedrooms. Michelle thought mom might miss a body in the bed next to hers if Michelle slept upstairs. That was the first night. Apparently, Mom had a fitful night that night, waking up many times, sometimes in panic, wondering where she was, where was Dick, and whose body was in the bed beside her. Michelle didn’t get much sleep that night. I think Mom was just sharpening her sleep deprivation tortures that first night of the deer hunting season.
The second night, as Michelle read in the bed next to my Mom’s bed, Mom insisted, “You better go upstairs and be with your children. If they wake up in the night, they’ll be scared if you aren’t there.” So, Michelle reluctantly went upstairs–where she had a lovely and peaceful night’s sleep.
On Friday night it was my turn. Michelle made me aware of how well Grandma (to her, Mom to me) slept “all by herself.” She didn’t say, “Don’t try to sleep in Grandma’s room,” but that was the message I didn’t quite let myself hear.
I’ve been tired this past month. I had a bone marrow transplant (leukemia) about three years ago. I take immune-suppressant drugs. When I get a cold, it knocks me down and out for a while. I caught a cold in mid-October. I am just getting over it. I still don’t have my full level of energy back. I was so looking forward to being at Mom’s–just the two of us–so I could sit in Dick’s easy chair, read, watch TV, and rest.
On Friday night my Mom seemed wired. Normally she sleeps while the TV is on. This night she walked around the house, looking out windows, wondering if anyone lived the homes next door to her home, asking their names, wondering why she can’t remember their names, and (eventually) imagining that she’d once lived in those homes. Then she got agitated. “I know that was my house once! How did they move in without paying me for it!”
Here we go again. Doctors call this “twilight-ing,” the time of the day (usually night) when the confusion gets more pronounced. I decided it was time for bed, even though it wasn’t quite 10 p.m. I reasoned optimistically with myself, “Mom hasn’t napped, so she’ll fall asleep soon. I can read for a while, then I’ll be sleepy and ‘voila,’ the night will pass in quiet splendor.” Wishful thoughts did not bring wished-for reality…
I got sleepy before Mom got sleepy. I turned over and tried to sleep. The lights were off and I was ready for a long winter’s sleep. Remarkably, my Mom began to whistle her favorite four bars of no song. She whistles under her breath. She does it constantly– while she’s awake–but I never expected her to do it constantly in during the night as she whistled herself to sleep. I looked at the clock–“10:40.” “She’ll whistle herself to sleep,” I guessed, so I simply rested and waited.
I’m sure I fell asleep in between the hours of 10:40 PM and 1:40 AM. I don’t think I could have lain there for three hours without sleeping. Still, I looked at the clock at 11:00 PM, 11:39 PM, 12:13 AM, 12:49 AM and 1:15 AM. I asked a couple of times, “Did you drink coffee today, Mom?” She couldn’t remember (she can’t remember what she ate or drank five minutes ago, so that question was purely rhetorical).
“Why?” she asked.
“Because you’re not asleep yet, and it’s 1:40 AM. You’ve been whistling all night long!”
“I don’t remember whistling. What am I whistling?”
“It sounds like ‘rey, do, fa, so’,” I whistled. “Please go to sleep.”
Next time I looked at the clock, it was 4:40 AM. Mother was panting in panic… “Nmnk, nmnk, nmnk, nmnk, nmnk…!” I woke her up to tell her she was having a bad dream. She immediately fell back to sleep. I could not.
So, I went upstairs to finish the night. No luck. Sleep wouldn’t come. At 7 AM I was up and drinking coffee. Mom slept for 4 more hours!
Fast forward one night….
“I’m tired,” Mom said at 10 PM. “I don’t want to go to bed until you stop watching TV,” she declared. I was watching Stanford play Oregon. It was quite a game. Her husband has a TV in the bedroom.
“How about if I watch the rest of the game in your room while you fall asleep?”
“Oh, that would be good. Dick watches TV in there, and I can sleep through the TV.”
Off I went. I got my water, my Kindle, my pillows, and hunkered down for the amazing second half of this great game. I kept the sound low. Several times I was certain Mom was sleeping, until she offered, “turn it up. I don’t know how you can hear it.”
“I can hear it fine, Mom.”
“Dick keeps it a lot louder than that and I can sleep anyway.”
Mom is very hard of hearing. I have to scream for her to hear me clearly. I kept the sound low, in spite of her encouragement. Again, I was confident she’d fallen asleep. I was getting tired in spite of my determination to watch the entire game.
“Turn it up. I don’t know how you can hear it. Dick keeps it a lot louder than that and I can sleep anyway.”
Why fight it? I turned it up to see if that would help her deepen her sleep. About 20 minutes later, she stirred and asked, “Who’s got the radio on?”
“It’s me, Mom,” I explained. “I’m watching the game.”
“Who is, ‘me’?”
“Your son, Rick.”
“Oh, hi, son. When did you get here? Where is Dick?”
I explained, again, that Dick was hunting, that I’d been here for two days, and that she had to go to sleep.
“You mean he asked you to watch me while he went deer hunting?” she said in a voice three or four decibels higher than her resting voice.
“No, I get to be with you. He didn’t ask me. I asked him, so I could have you all to myself.”
Quietly, “Okay. That’s nice, Richard. I’m glad you’re here.”
I turned off the TV and read for a few minutes. It seemed quiet. I got up out of Dick’s bed and took my pillows and Kindle to the door.
“Where you going?”
“I’m going to sleep upstairs.”
“Okay. I don’t care where you sleep. Good night, Honey.”
Relief flooded me like I’d escaped a bad dream. I was going to have that good night’s sleep Michelle explained was possible if one slept upstairs. I immediately fell asleep around 11:00 PM.
About 11:20 PM, I was startled by a bright light with my mother asking, “Who’s sleeping here?”
OMG! “Mom! It’s me, Rick. I was sleeping in your room, and I decided we’d both sleep better if Icame up here.”
“Oh, okay, that’s fine.” She turned off the light, shut the door and went downstairs to sleep. I immediately fell back to sleep.
About 30 to 45 minutes later (no clock in this room staring me in the face when I opened my eyes), the same scenario repeated: Bright lights on as my Mom stood in the adjoining bathroom with a voice yelling, “Who is sleeping in here!?”
OMG. This wasn’t going to work. “It’s me, Mom.”
“Who?”
“Rick!”
“Is it just you in here?” sounding a bit like a suspicious wife who wondered who I ran off with while she was sleeping.
“Yes, Mom. It’s just me.”
“Is it just the two of us in the house?”
“Yep. Just you and me, kid.”
“Oh, I thought there were more people in the house tonight. I couldn’t figure out where everyone was.”
“I’m coming downstairs to sleep, Mom.”
“You don’t have to do that!” she insisted. She didn’t know how deeply I wished that were true. I also feared that one more awakening with bright lights in my face and a screaming voice would send me into the world shared only by those who were tortured by torturers trained in the art of sleep deprivation!
I stumbled downstairs. 1:40 AM. I forgot my Kindle. It’s like my blanky. I need it to sleep. I walked back upstairs, got what I needed for my new location (pillows, Kindle, glasses, water). I read awhile. Mom kept asking what I was doing. “Reading.” She didn’t get this machine that I could read from.
Soon I was asleep. At 4:40 AM (the clock was in front of my opening eyes), she was pushing me and saying, “Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey… Who are you?”
“Your son, Rick.”
“Rick?”
“Yes”
“Where’s Dick….”
“Deer hunting….”
“You mean….”
“No… I’m here because he’s not… can have you all to myself. Please try to sleep.”
I wasn’t sure I would fall asleep again but, gratefully, I did…. Until… 5:30 A.M. Now she was just talking in her sleep. “I saw Gloria. She’s still working at Fisher Body (where Mom worked for 25 years until my father died). She got a new car. She’s doing really well.”
I said nothing… hoping I could drift off for a few more hours. I did drift, until 7:15 AM. “Are you going soon?” (Oh God, I wish I could say, “yes.”) I humored her.
“Sure, Mom. Pretty soon.”
“Okay, have a safe trip. I’ll be okay here by myself.”
Rick: I wonder if this was pay-back for all the sleepless nights you may have caused your mother in your young and reckless days?
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