Hope in the Night

I've stopped the medication that booted me into early menopause and turned off the sleep switch in my brain. I'm hoping sleep will now come more easily once again. Yet sometimes, the stillness of the wee hours helped me think...

Hope in the Night
by Maureen Morley

(February 25, 2005)

The duvet rustles in the dark as I flop – a bit gingerly, which isn’t very satisfying – from my back to my side. I’ve got an assorted army of minor aches and pains in my body these days: a dull throb across my chest, a little stab on a lower right rib, soreness in my hip joints that radiates down my quadriceps, several tender spots along my spine. The cancer has pitched tents in strategic locations, is sending out troops and gathering reinforcements. I lie still and make sure I haven’t made anything worse by moving into this position, before straining my neck to take in the time: 3:15 am. I hear the drone of a car as it drives by the house, then the distant snore of Carrie, our landlady, sleeping soundly one floor above us. I listen to make sure Steve - an arm’s length from me in our king-size bed - is breathing. He’s only an intermittent snorer, although every so often his intake of air is so violent that I’m tempted to turn on the light to make sure he hasn’t engulfed his face. At those times, if he doesn’t wake himself up and I can’t take it anymore, I kick at the duvet so it will crinkle loudly, and he’ll stir and stop for a while. But tonight, he’s quiet. It’s not his fault – not the fault of noise at all – that I’m so often restless nowadays when I should be sleeping.

No, I blame it on induced menopause. That, and a system-shocking barrage of medication culminating in chemotherapy – the big guns – injected and ingested into my body since we learned, a year and a half ago, that this breast cancer had metastasized first to my bones and then to my liver.

I can’t complain too much. A couple of poor sleeping years out of thirty-eight aren’t so bad. I used to be the envy of my family for the ease with which sleep took me. Sit me in an airplane and I’d be out before the safety video ended.

I sigh – ah, the days – and flip again onto my back. But it really isn’t that bad. It’s not as if I have a hectic schedule that demands I rise at first light; I can sleep in, and by morning I tend to be more relaxed and comfortable. It’s just that the purpose of nighttime seems to have changed from rest to wondering. Something’s afoot. Reading Internet information sites that quote average life expectancy for someone in my shoes at eighteen to twenty-four months – and now eighteen months have passed – can make a girl think. Nighttime affords lots of time. Its quiet is long and uninterrupted, allowing my thoughts to steep in the darkness like tea in hot water, swirling and taking on deeper hues.

My friend Maria, from the women’s metastatic cancer support group, died last Friday. What has happened to her? Where is she now? Taylor, the woman who facilitates our group, sent around an email and I was shocked by the picture that was attached. It showed a Maria I never met: a confident, reasonably happy and plump woman of fifty. She looked ordinary, cheerful but not remarkable, unlike the Maria I sat beside at lunch a month ago, listening to her indict the vicious nuns that ran her primary school. The Maria I knew was a much thinner, balder woman, her face all eyes like a mischievous, but somewhat tormented, little girl. Her face had lost pretensions. She was beautiful.

I inhale, drawing on my counseling days (you can’t be anxious and breathing calmly at the same time), and see her eyes, feel the pool that springs up behind my own and exhale long and deliberately. I want to stay calm, to remain in this peaceful place even while my heart goes out to Maria, wherever she is. Has she found the rest that she wanted? Oh, God, I hope so. Lord, have mercy. Please, have mercy on us all...

I place a period on the end of the plea and Maria’s eyes recede as I drift elsewhere. I’m surprised I don’t feel despair. An acquaintance at school today told me he and his family pray for me and Steve almost every day. I don’t even know this guy, and Steve knows him only a little. People keep telling us they are praying, and I think I feel it. My thoughts feel supported and protected; the tea held in a sturdy mug. They don’t ooze out in a thousand potentially perilous directions, not anymore.

Back on my right side now, an inevitable and recently recurring reverie: what will it be like for me, after I die? I don’t care about mansions or jewels or, even, chocolate. Stuff (and stuffing myself) never did much for my loneliness. What about all these people in my life now: Steve and my parents; my sisters and brothers; Sara, Nikki, and all my friends; the folks at church? Why have I felt it right to spend so much time trying to share my life with them and sharing in theirs? After so many years of wanting to feel such care and love for others, and to receive it back, what’s the point of it all happening now if I’m just going to up and die? It doesn’t make sense.

In the darkness, again, I remember God. It helps me to be a little didactic with myself. I remember that he’s really really big and really really good. He tells us that we are to love him and each other. And now I get a little excited, feel my heart flutter and stretch. Relationships matter to him. He’s gone through all kinds of trouble to show us that he is for us, that he loves us. He’s all about us caring for each other, building strong relationships. It gives me hope that somehow, in some way that I can’t fathom, I get to stay involved in the lives of people that I love after I die. It gives me hope that part of worshipping him with all the hosts of the angels and the saints includes caring for the people he cares about. Jesus was crucified, but he was resurrected. And even after he ascended again into heaven, we’re told – and I experience it – that he’s still alive, active in the lives of people in the world. And if I am to become like him, well then I hope that means somehow my relationships continue and also that I’m infinitely better at loving after I’m in Heaven than I’ve ever been on Earth. Paul, in 1 Corinthians, likens our current bodies to seeds with potential to blossom into fully-flowered bodies of unimaginable splendor. Currents of quiet excitement run through me.

Outside in the garden, I hear the two-note trill, a tiny dawn trumpet. The first note is higher than the second; the second sounds longer than the first. This solitary singer always begins the birds’ morning song, “Yoo-hooo…You-who,” over and over again, eventually joined by a cacophony of cheerful chatter.

Splendor? I know I can’t figure it out with my puny little seed-consciousness. Instead, I doze in and out to the twitter-patting of the birds for several more hours, brewing on automatic, hoping that I get to love these people forever.