| View Blog
|
|
|
|
| Feb. 2, 2009 Sleepless in Savannah |
On the couch......Life as a Sofa Slug
My friend Herbert laughed at the thought of me holding court for visitors from my couch. I try everyday to get up out of bed and do at least one normal routine thing like feed the feral cats that grace my yard or make myself a bowl of cereal... but often all that effort lands me on my couch with several soft toys tucked in the cushions for when I need emergency cuddles. Then I wait. I wait for sleep, I wait for an idea to write down, I wait for my eyes to focus so I can read, I wait for the motivation to get up and do something to exercise my wasting muscles, I wait for this waiting period to be over.
I had a wonderful cat once. Chesspiece was 23 pounds and the terror of my neighborhood-- keeping dogs at bay and checking out my neighbor’s garden protecting it from mice and critters like a National Guardsman on duty. He developed an appreciation for corn and would go through garbages looking for cobs to suck and roll on. Anyway, the point is that when he was ready to go to the great catnip field in the sky, he walked away from home and on a walkabout in the woods behind our apartment. We were sad, but I had heard of animals wandering off to quietly pick their place and time. After three days he came back because he was ravenously hungry. He lived an active life and happy cat life another year or so until he died of a stroke. But each time I just sit on my couch and wait for an impulse to move, I think of Chesspiece just waiting... and waiting... and waiting for something to happen. Life (not even his death) happened without him getting up and actively making it happen.
But it is not so easy to move about on all these drugs I need to take. I am not sleepy but sooo tired. I never understood this type of fatigue when my friends—or even my dad went through this. Oh, I am not depressed about this, I know this is normal for any person recuperating from surgery or illness, but it does take some getting used to—not just for me, but I think for my friends and business associates who are used to me jumping on any invitation to do something, or go somewhere.
But I am unable to motivate any action even when people stop by on one of my 6 to 8 good days a month. My neighbors and friends and family have been terrific. When people drop off food or cards or other wonderful thoughtful tokens to let me know I am being thought of and prayed for, I sit up on my couch covered with my wonderful blanket and I try to smile and converse for awhile before I just need to rest. It is so rude, but I really can not help it.
Seems odd that I can be too tired to move, yet not able to sleep. My mind can be so full of ideas, but sometimes I have no language to express them. My body hungers for exercise, yet I am shaky and can not move and sometimes my mouth—that overactive motor--- is too tired to formulate the words that my brain is thinking. The reality is that it is such an effort to communicate, that even when I have something to add to a conversation, I just close my eyes and listen instead, before I drift off to my dreams.
For graduate school I wrote a play adaptation of Tolstoy’s novella the Death of Ivan Illych. The focus was about changes one had to make in the translation—from Russian to English, from novella to play genre, from 19th century to 20th. It has taken 25 years, but I understand Ivan Illych better now than I did then—in his illness he had become an observer of life—not a participant. Illych survives in a different existence to everyone else’s (consider other such characters like Kafka’s metamorphosized character or Star Trek’s Spock in a parallel universe) with a different set of rules and time signatures. Slowly as his disease progresses, Illych is unable to relate to the other conversations and events around him. I did not realize it, but he was holding court “ Restless from his Room in Russia” the way I am now “Sleepless from my Settee in Savannah”.
I was talking to my friend Arnold who mentioned about sitting up awake unable to move after his cancer treatments awhile back. Too tired to focus on reading, yet too awake to sleep. I am sad he had suffered through cancer, but so relieved to hear someone else say this. So one sits and waits for the next visitor, the next set of minutes connected to a new hour of new possibilities or for night to come and justify getting back into bed, in order to start all over tomorrow.
But maybe I have been sleepless in Savannah for awhile. Maybe I never understood this about my friends and challenges their illnesses created. I never really understood how someone could not snap themselves out of a depression and just start living, or choose not to be bi-polar or not be pleasant after a chemo treatment that was making them better; maybe I needed cancer to teach me that maybe I have been awake and yet asleep to the needs of my friends and family without knowing it all these years. Maybe that is what I needed to learn from this experience: to give my friends my full attention when they need me, and to wake up and come home hungry enough to give my own wonderful life another chance.
|
|
Posted by morningstar on 2009-02-03 10:26:33 | Rating: | Views: 70
|
|
| |
|
|
Email This to a Friend 
