Dear Creators,

In the dark of the morning, I wake and sleep and wake again. I roll from side to side, drift into and out of rest. I check my phone: 4:04am.

“Is it scary?” I ask my father.

“Scary? Not really. I mean, at four in the morning when you wake up and you’re looking at the black, it’s a little scary. You wonder what’s happening and what’s gonna happen and you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop…”

Check again: 4:16.

“But it’s just day-to-day, moment-to-moment. It’s not even really significant in any sense. It just is. Not remarkable. No big revelation.”

I have a sore throat. Not that bad, but the lymph node on the left of my neck is swollen, and a light shined into my mouth shows one of my tonsils, angry and red, with a weird pale mucus mass, has climbed across the back of my throat.

No fever. No chills. No pains of an obtuse nature. Not even that bad of a sore throat.

And yet the unexplained triggers me and I lunge toward the abyss.

He asks me: “When you know that the reality is that you’re only going to live for 3, 6, 9 months — is it possible to make the most of that time? Can you really live that time? Or is it a fiction?”

This sleeplessness, I think, is a mental game. Anxiety. Fear. Heavy and human.

He never slept. Two taps on the forehead and he was awake, “What’s up, boychik?” Never mad, never frustrated, never a complaint. Up to pull out the bulky futon. Ready to lay next to you where it was impossible not to fall back into the heaviest sleep.

(Later, I watch the dogs sleep and wake again; alert for danger? For food? For what? Not anxious, per se, just poised to participate; or is our anxiety the same, only overactive, tied to our complex metaphysics? Is it all just an urge to participate?)

Now, I drift toward sleep, but am blown off course by darker thoughts, thoughts on the edge — the abyss, of course. That amorphous place. That fear.

It is also where I find him; my thoughts fold into his.

Or those that I imagine to be his.

I see him lying awake, next to my mother who breathes heavily in complete somnolence. I feel his worry spike, his questions lurch, his fears build.

Check, quickly: 4:33.

But it’s my fear. My spike. My questions.

Him, again: “I wouldn’t claim to have any profound thoughts about it. But it is humbling.”

I: seek peace in his rest; seek gifts in his peace. More denouement than end. Though that doesn’t mean I’ve healed from it.

Fear not the death, but the dying.

When I finally do sleep fully, he is also there: At a new job! Living somewhere else! Just relocated! He’s 55, at a healthy weight, flush, his beard dark.

From one side of a glass-walled boardroom I ask him if I should see a doctor and he’s annoyed I haven’t already.

“You have to take care of yourself, man.”

His tone is terse, but it’s an annoyance underlined by love. How many times did he schlep me to doctors, to hospitals, to the urgent care? How many of his nights were spent at my side while I endured asthma treatments, antibiotics, nebulizers, chest x-rays? How much of his sleep was disturbed by tracking my raspy breath?

Now, he’s been in meetings all day. He’s busy, engaged in work. He’s wearing a button down, thin and silk, with slacks, and no tie.

He’s as real as he ever was — in 2005. Perhaps I’m less real, transported there as I am now, asking him questions about routine medical matters while he’s trying to work.

I sit in so many meetings myself these days, Pops. And I haven’t worn a tie in years.

I’m still wearing your sneakers.

When I wake, I check again: 6:16.

I don’t know what is in my throat, but I am glad I could confer with him about it.

The dark outside is beginning to break. The house is quiet. Even the dogs are in deep repose.

I’m scared. What is this thing my body is doing? Feeling? Going through?

Probably nothing. Almost certainly nothing.

A doctor will see me Monday. In the meantime, I will rest.

Not remarkable. No big revelation. No reason, really, to wait for the other shoe.

We all know what it will be — we just don’t know when.

3, 6, 9 months. Or 40 years.

In the meantime, I will try to rest.

“Yes! Comfortable, warm reader. Men do not fear death, they fear the pain of dying.”
—Apsley Cherry-Garrard

Onward to creative joy,

Joey

Alan Rubin, Graphite and acrylic on Rives BFK 22x30 inches. September 2015.

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