The Turning Point -- Insomnia and Matters of the Heart

 

I usuallymanage to get to sleep alright, I just keep waking up around 3am and am unable to get back to sleep. Last night was difficult. I put on some Enya and begged, pleaded and prayed for Sharon to visit me. The music elicited some strong emotions in me, some of which didn't help me sleep. We'd played Enya during various trips to the coast, so I got transported into random memories of those trips. One was a particularly upsetting recollection of when Sharon was first experiencing MS symptoms while we were out walking in Fort Bragg.

A game we used to play, whenever we'd go walking or driving through nice neighborhoods, was to point out certain properties and fantasize about what it would be like to live there. She'd always notice the properties with acreage, of course. That was priority number one for a horse person. But sometimes she'd notice a house with a particularly nice deck or a picture window, and we'd play the "what would we do if we won the lottery" game.

But lately, when walking or exerting herself at all, her eyesight would get blurry, and she had difficulty seeing anything at all. On this trip we were walking past some construction that was going on near the beach, where someone was building their dream house. She was asking me to describe, in detail, what she could not see. I became frustrated with the level of exactitude she was demanding and said something to the effect that I didn't want to play this game anymore.

In life, there are pivotal moments when things shift from one trajectory to another. I didn't feel the weight of my words that day, although I could see they upset her. I'd just wanted things to be the way they'd always been, with us enjoying carefree vacations. She was experiencing a frightening new MS symptom and wanted me to reassure her that I'd be there to fill in for her lack of visual ability with my own words. 

It was an opportunity which I blew miserably. I could have painted her a picture of that dream house, in all its fine detail, and she could have pictured it in her mind. I could have given the fertile ground of her own imagination the seeds to place us there, in scenarios of fantasy, living like king and queen of this beautiful castle overlooking the ocean. We'd dreamed of such things and coveted many people's lives as we'd strolled along beachfront property in the past.

But this was the beginning of the end of those dreams. I couldn't or wouldn't even describe the house being built to her. I couldn't picture us in it any longer. Her near blindness would spoil the perfect lives we'd hope to live in any future house, fantasy or otherwise. I was not taking the "worse" and "sickness" aspects of our wedding vows as gracefully as the more positive "better" and "health" parts.

Laying in bed, listening to Enya, I felt the emotions she must have felt at that moment. Reaching out for some kind of sympathetic support from her husband, instead she got a cold slap of the reality that she'd married a selfish brat, a narcissistic, fair-weather spouse. 

She must have withered inside at the thought of being married to someone who couldn't muster up the slightest empathy. Someone who couldn't see past his own thoughts to give their sick spouse what they were desperately needing at the time: comfort, reassurance and the promise to make things better when they were taking a turn for the worse. Prince Charming, I was not. I was a royal turd.

These and many other flashes of memories played in my head to Enya's, sometimes melancholy, sometimes hopeful soundtrack, eliciting tears. The good times that we shared are all painted blue, when revisited in my mind, filtered through the lens of regret and loss.

I finally did get to sleep and wound up dreaming of Sharon. This time she was in her bedridden phase, in a critical stage of decline. We were in some different surroundings, having come out of a care facility, back to a residence which was new to us. The situation had the exact same feel as when we returned home from our fire evacuation in 2017.

At some point during the transition, I had stopped the daily personal hygiene routine and forgot to start it back up. I noticed that sores were developing on her backside as a result. These were the beginning of the unfixable type of sores which lead to infection and are present in the end stages of illness. I felt the complete crushing responsibility of having caused this to happen through my negligence. If only I had kept to our routine, this never would have happened.

Sharon and I experienced many of these milestones as we went down the path of her illness together. At each turn, I met the event with resistance instead of acceptance, anger instead of empathy. I was a soulless, graceless complainer, with whom she had the sorry misfortune of being paired, on a journey she never chose. I will never get to apologize now. 

All I can do is try to fill my days with enough distraction to block out the thoughts that would drive me to suicide, the only fitting end to a life so poorly lived. I'm sure that's not what Sharon would want for me, were still she around to want anything anymore. Sometimes, though, I think I'm kidding myself thinking that her soul, if such a thing even exists, would bother to hang around this miserable prison watching my wretched life play out.

I want to be one of those people who can make their ordeal into an inspirational story. One that can give people who might be going through something similar, hope that there is light at the end of the tunnel. So far all I've done is describe the tunnel in great detail. 

I'm the quantum version of the story where Papillon dies in prison, a broken man. Maybe in another universe there's an Andrew turning his trials into gold, who has the world's greatest lemonade stand with lemons hand picked from the tree that life has given him. This one is just a rat in a self-created cage, festering in his own waste. In this case, the waste is my excessive verbosity.