Sleeping Well

(Nonfiction Essay)

            My dad snores.  Like a chain saw.  Not the high-squealing saws that slice through trees like cake, but the ornery ones that never start the first time, or the third.  The kind that burst when you pull the chain, then sputter into a low growl and stop to exhale. 

            We used to go on group camping trips where five or six families we knew from church would rent a large cabin in the woods and we would all sleep inside on cots.  Everyone, that is, except for my parents who were forced to sleep in the Chinook outside.  You could still hear my father through the trees like some rabid animal, but the log cabin walls muffled him just enough to make sleep possible. 

            "How do you sleep at your house?" an adult would ask when my parents were outside of earshot.  "How does your mother handle it?"

            Their questions were strange to me.  It was on those nights when my father was out of town on some business trip that I studied the patterns on the stucco ceiling until morning, without the reassuring sound of my father to lull me to sleep, to comfort me, to remind me that he was there, letting me know with every breath that he was alive just a few rooms away.  Silence was like noise to me.  I loved the fact that he snored.  I depended on it. 

Not that it didn’t amuse us.  When my father snored, my sister and I would watch him and giggle at each gurgling inhale.  At times, there would be a pause, and we'd wait, anticipating, hardly able to contain ourselves.  Then the sound would come again like an explosion, and we would curl up in our seats laughing.  And there were other times, too: in movie theaters, at the dinner table, while he manned the rudder of our sailboat.  The first to see my father’s bobbing head and squinty eyes would nudge the other in time for them to see his eyes close, the chin drop: once, twice, then his body slumped and hands dropped to his sides, and he snored, good gracious, he did. 

His snores were the things of legend, even a point for boasting:  “You think your dad snores?”  It only took one sleep over at my house to gain unconditional concession.  “Your dad is amazing.”

It sure frightened my mother, though, especially on those long drives home.  My mother would sit, waiting for the sound of the car pulling into the driveway.  His sleeping, my mother was certain, would be the death of him. 

I suppose it made sense that she’d see a side of sleep that I never did.  Even then, I recognized the intimacy of sleep between mother and father.  Still, I had not shared my mother’s fear until years later when my father stumbled into the living room one Saturday morning, with leaded eyelids and twisted locks of hair stuck to his head like mounds of shaving cream.  He wrestled himself into his chair, licking the top of his mouth as if he tasted something bitter, having just enough time to change the channel before he drifted off again, still clasping the remote control over the arm of his chair.  His head was tilted back in his usual position, open mouthed during one of his familiar lulls, and I realized, he wasn’t breathing.  His jaw moved, opening and closing in a kind of pumping motion, and his head bobbed like some baby bird begging for the mother’s worm.  After perhaps two minutes, he broke open the air passage in his throat and filled his lungs with a drowning victim’s first gasp of air.

It wasn’t long after that I overheard my mother talking on the phone in hushed tones.  My father had apparently fallen asleep in a meeting, and nobody dared to wake him.  From the conversation, I’d gathered that this wasn’t the first time.  When my father lost his job several months later due to “restructuring”, my mind was focused on garage bands and video games, and only now do I think of those conversations they must have had in the bedroom, late at night.  But something must have entered my subconscious because I was having trouble sleeping.  I began searching the closets before turning in at night, and triple checking the locks on the doors and windows, and fought the occasional bout of insomnia.  I believed that if I was always awake, I could defend myself from the intruders who came at night.  Perhaps, I had started to see how sleep left you defenseless.  My father often seemed spacey, and never heard things the first time.  His eyelids remained incessantly swollen and heavy.  It was almost as if sleep exhausted him.

But we packed up our belongings and drove a U-Haul across the country to settle in Arizona.  The desert is the place where many go to spend the rest of their summers in the twilight of their lives, but for us it was morning.  My father started teaching at the community college, and my mother’s job at the lab offered a health plan, so check-ups became regular.  My father fell asleep in the doctor’s office, of course, and the doctor made him an appointment at some clinic.  They told him the symptoms then: the loss of breathing, the lack of REM sleep—unchecked, the heart may stop.  My father came back several visits later with a mask that he straps to his face before bed.  It's the kind that F16 pilots get to wear, with a clear plastic tube that connects to a little white box with a handle.  "They say I'm the worst snorer in Arizona," he said with a proud smile. 

My father stopped stumbling, and slept at the appropriate times.  He’d fix us breakfast on Saturdays, and I could leave the windows open without fearing that night might consume me.  Watching my father emerge from the bedroom was no longer as amusing as it used to be, though the mask does leave this purple indent around his nose and mouth that disappears sometime after he leaves, and before he returns from work in the evenings.  I’m an adult now, and no longer need the sounds of my father’s snores to lull me to sleep, but on those evenings when I visit, and I’m in the room next to his, I can hear the gentle purr of the machine as it pumps air into his lungs, and I sleep a little better, too.

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