Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me(2)

Winter Trees





SLEEP: LOSS


I used to think that the only thing worse than having insomnia was having insomnia next to someone who falls fast asleep and stays soundlessly so till morning.

That was my life for more than sixteen years. In San Francisco I lived with a man who slept, yes, like a baby. There were nights, many nights, when I literally wanted to steal his sleep—slip beneath his eyelids and yank it out of him; a kind of middle-of-the-night Chien Andalou moment. Instead, I spent the equivalent of at least a tenth of our relationship lying awake or reading in bed. In the end, that I happened to be in a deep sleep when Steve went into cardiac arrest next to me now seems beyond irony. If I had not taken half a sleeping pill that night ten years ago, might I have been awake and saved him?

I can no longer remember the sound of his laughter but I clearly recall what he looked like while sleeping: his head propped on a scrunched-up pillow, his muscular arms, his breath blown in warm puffs from the corner of his mouth, the place where Popeye’s pipe would go. I suppose this is the upside to insomnia. I clocked a lot of time studying Steve in repose.

His death had been as swift as it was inexplicable: He had been only forty-three and remarkably fit, with no history of heart problems. At first, I’d thought he was having a nightmare, but he was thrashing so violently and unable to speak. I called 911, began CPR, EMTs came. I remember how they kept asking me if we’d been doing drugs; the question seemed absurd; Steve was so clean-living, so wholesome really, he never even drank a beer. They got him to an ER just a few blocks away. But by then he was gone.

My upstairs neighbor had heard the commotion and gotten herself to the hospital. Vicki virtually scooped me up off the floor of the ER and did her best to console me, then turned to Steve. She swaddled his body in a nice clean sheet, making sure that every edge was neatly tucked, and she quietly said a prayer as I closed his eyelids with my fingers. I don’t know how long passed before I told her I was ready to leave. I had to sign some papers, but there was nothing more to do. Vicki walked me home.

Just a couple of hours after leaving for the hospital, I reentered our apartment. I’d say I was in shock or numbed but, no, I felt everything—everything—and it all hurt. In our bedroom, it looked like an earthquake had hit—a lamp knocked over by the EMTs, the bed askew, a broken glass, books—Steve’s stacks of beloved sci-fi paperbacks—scattered. The floor was littered with strewn Epinephrine syringes and caps from the defibrillator charges. Vicki and her husband began cleaning up the mess, and called my friends Jane and Paul to come over. I collapsed in the other room. If Steve had died in an earthquake, it would have made more sense to me.

A few days later, I went to see a minister. Neither Steve nor I was religious but I wanted to talk to someone. She did not bring up God or heaven or the afterlife. She was wonderful, more like a doctor explaining a diagnosis. “Suffering a devastating loss is like suffering a brain injury,” she said. She spoke really slowly, which I appreciated. “You walk around like a zombie. You can’t think straight. You feel drugged—”

Sometimes you are drugged, I thought to myself.

To be safe, I started keeping a notepad inside the medicine cabinet. “Yes, you took an Ambien at 11,” I would jot, answering a question I knew I would ask myself when I woke four hours later. Or: “2 X @ 3,” meaning two Xanaxes at three A.M.—no wait, maybe it was three in the afternoon? I don’t remember now.

In those early days of grief, short on sleep, forgetting to eat, I felt as though I were in a liminal state, not quite alive myself, which made me feel remarkably close to Steve. During that same period, I was continually having amazing encounters with strangers—people who would pop up and offer help, whether at the post office or grocery store, or just say something kind. At the time, I never doubted that they were embodiments of him.

One day I met a man with the name of an angel. He was French. His accent was so thick it sounded fake. We got to talking and I told him what had happened. “You’re going to be fine,” Emmanuel said right away. “Something bad always leads to something good.” He spoke from personal experience. His partner had died six years earlier. But he did not use that word, died, as he told me his story. Nor did he say passed away, a euphemism I had come to hate. Instead, Emmanuel said, “When my partner disappeared …”

I knew this was not a case of poor English, a bungled translation. Still, I had to say something. “You said ‘disappeared’—”

He nodded.

“That’s exactly how it feels for me, too.”

One might think that for someone who has lost a partner or spouse, nights would be hardest, loneliest. For me, this was not the case. I was used to being alone at night, the only one awake. I didn’t even have more than the usual trouble sleeping after the first few weeks. I suppose this was partly because Steve and I had never been bedtime cuddlers or spooners, so I was not missing something I’d once had. That said, it was a long time before I was able to take his pillow from his side of the bed. I did not dare. The night after he died, I found that a sliver of light from a streetlamp shone through the blinds just so and cast a single yellowy tendril across his pillow. It was the opposite of a shadow. Which is as clear a definition as I can come up with for the soul.

With morning, the light was gone, and I found the days empty and agonizing. It would take about three years for this feeling to pass—a thousand days, give or take—people who had been through this told me. As it turns out, they were right. What no one said is something I discovered on my own: A thousand days is a thousand nights is a thousand chances to dream about him.