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Let’s Pretend You Won’t Die (But Just in Case, What Should I Do?)
I didn’t know what to worry about more: Dave’s overburdened heart with its missing blood vessels, or the cancer confirmed to be growing in his colon. Or, of course, his problem breathing at night. The first time we tried to rest together, in my apartment in 2002, he couldn’t trust his lungs to keep inhaling, exhaling, as he lay awake on my bed. “I sleep with a breathing machine,” he explained. After twenty restless minutes, he said, “I need to go home to my machine.”
Later, when we became a long-term couple, learning to sleep in Dave’s bedroom along with the alternating huff and humm of that machine came hard at first for me. And there were so many little colored lights glowing in the darkened room: blue at the computer, green for a battery back-up, white on the breathing machine, red where the cable brought signal into the room and on the TV. Eventually I told myself to imagine it as a nighttime airfield, and I angled away from most of the lights, pressing my “better ear” to the pillow. Learning, learning.
By 2016, that all was routine — but so were the moments I’d wake during the night, holding still, listening to make sure the machine continued its lifesaving rhythm and Dave still breathed steadily beside me.
