How had the intruder gotten in? Not through the dead-bolted door to our fourth-story apartment. Not through the windows. I couldn’t see his face. Our bedroom was too dark. My husband was thirty miles away at Johns Hopkins Hospital on a ventilator with a tube down his throat. To prevent him from reflexively yanking out the tube, his hands were strapped to his bed. His heart had been failing for months. He couldn’t help me.
I wanted to spend the night in the chair beside him, but his cardiologist had sent me home. “You’ll need your rest,” he said. The future tense, as if he were speaking a warning. I thought I’d be too exhausted to sleep when I got home, especially after I’d stopped for gas at an all-night convenience store where men hanging around the pumps were drinking and shooting up. But I fell asleep the moment I turned out the light.
And now I was wide awake, staring at the intruder who stood at the foot of my bed.
The red digits of my clock glowed three-twenty a.m.
The intruder lay down on top of me so gently that, in my fatigue, I had no urge to scream or fight back. He seemed weightless. I remember how odd that was until I felt his hair fall onto my face. I recognized the feathery touch. Relieved. I said, Oh, it’s you.
Immediately, I regretted it. He vanished as silently as he’d arrived. I was positive that by addressing him directly, I had violated the laws governing night travel across great distances and through walls.
He was my best friend, my lover, my personal stand-up comic, my gourmet chef. We became parents and learned to become adults together. The moments we had with each other now were as precious as our first days of falling in love decades earlier. Carelessly, I had just lost one of those moments.
I couldn’t stop myself from crying, Please come back.
Another violation I realized too late. I had closed off all possibility that he could return.
He needs me, I thought. He must be in trouble. I lifted the phone, which made no sense.
I didn’t believe in religion, an afterlife, god, telepathy, ESP, supernatural phenomena, or motion that didn’t follow the laws of gravity, so I scolded myself, Don’t be dramatic, He isn’t weightless. He can’t travel through walls. He is thirty miles away. You were dreaming.
That was hard to believe. I regarded myself as something of an expert on dreams. Eight years earlier, I’d recorded mine faithfully, several a night, in an effort to teach myself the art of lucid dreaming, a state of dreaming in which you are aware that you are dreaming and not, as dreams can fool you into thinking, flying to Europe on an elephant. Dreams warped reality that way. By keeping a dream journal, I’d learned to recognize their signs, pygmy animals napping on chairs, for example, and extra rooms I’d wanted but hadn’t been there before. Dreams sometimes argue back. When a dream mugger insisted he was real, I grabbed his head and tore him down the middle as if he were a character in a comic book. Dream, I said. His fragments floated to the gutter. Like that dream mugger, my emotions told me that my husband really transported himself to our bedroom. Not a dream, they insisted. If my husband’s visit had been a dream, they reminded me, the shape of our bedroom would have been distorted, I would have shouted Dream instead of Oh, it’s you, and—a really tell-tale sign. I would have woken up when he disappeared, not—as I’d done—when he arrived.
Logic of course, still insisted that my husband’s appearance was a dream. Everything I knew about science told me that he not have made a nighttime visit to our bedroom.
And when my emotions became aware they were losing their battle with rationality, they yelled, If you aren’t going to phone the hospital, at least write down what happened. It will be concrete evidence that your husband visited you at three-twenty a.m.
If I’d remembered my dream journal entry the night before my brother’s heart attack eight years earlier, I might have searched for a pen.
* * *
Eight years earlier.
My brother’s heart attack took me and the rest of my family by surprise. He was only forty-nine. At the time I didn’t know him well. He was ten when I’d gone away to college. We hadn’t lived near each other since then. Even our vacation homes were hundreds of miles apart. In those days, long-distance phone calls were expensive. We didn’t make them.
My brother’s heart attack was massive. It damaged so much tissue that doctors placed him in a medically induced coma, nearly motionless. I drove five hundred miles to spend a few hours next to his dormant body. I parked my dark blue Ford Explorer in his driveway beside his car, which, to my surprise, was a black Explorer, the same year and model as mine. Although it would have been rational to believe that our cars were nearly identical by coincidence, I found myself stroking his Explorer as if it were a relic of a mythical saint I didn’t believe in.
Two months later, after I’d returned home, my brother awoke from his coma, he and I spoke by phone. He told me that he’d realized he was having a heart attack when he was in his Explorer on his way to a construction site he supervised. He had driven to a gas station and asked the attendants to phone 911. He also told me that upon awakening from his coma, he had a vivid memory of leaving his life.
I lost my fear of dying, he said. Leaving was peaceful. I don’t know why I decided to return to life. When I mentioned this to my surgeon, he told me that technically I died on the operating table and that he’d been amazed he could revive me.
Because fear of my own death often showed up in my dreams, my brother’s near-death experience spurred me to reread my journal. I had no memory of my dream the night my brother had his heart attack—it certainly hadn’t worried me, the way some dreams did. But there, in my own handwriting, were the key elements of my brother’s heart attack story:
I was…in my Ford Explorer….Every time I came to what looked like a gas station, it was nonexistent or closed. I tried to call the police. The phone was on the wall. I wondered if I should call 911.
Within minutes of discovering that dream, I telephoned my brother. What do you think? I asked.
You shouldn’t dream, he said in a tone that made me realize he was remembering his out-of-body experience.
It was a coincidence, I laughed.
From five hundred miles away, I felt his equilibrium shake.
* * *
But, as I said, the night the intruder visited me, I wasn’t thinking about my brother or that dream. It was far too long ago. I was focused on my husband who was suffering on a ventilator at Johns Hopkins. And as his cardiologist had said, to face what was coming, I needed rest. I didn’t call the hospital. I didn’t write anything down. I rolled onto my side and went back to sleep.
Only to be jolted by the ringing phone. My alarm clock now read five-thirty.
A doctor on duty in coronary care said, Two hours ago, your husband took a turn for the worse. His blood pressure dropped, and his fever spiked. She wanted permission to open his neck to find the source of the fever.
My whole being screamed, Two hours ago, he needed me. I should have driven to the hospital or at least telephoned. I don’t want him to suffer needlessly. He should be participating in the decision about whether to operate.
In a quandary, I phoned his cardiologist.
Operating is our only hope, he said. He asked me to meet him at his hospital office.
I rushed to Baltimore, parked the car, and raced to his office. He hadn’t arrived, so I sat on the bench where my husband and I had so often waited for his appointment. Near a window close by, there was a night-blooming cereus, a plant that bloomed only at night and only once a year. My husband and I had watched its growth for months. As I waited for the cardiologist, I walked to the window. As if the cereus bore witness to my husband’s waning life, its bloom, from only hours before, was already wilting.
The cardiologist’s arrival startled me from my reverie. Surgery hadn’t revealed the cause of my husband’s fever. I understood that we were out of options. Ventilators weren’t for long-term life support. My husband would be disconnected within a day or two, the cardiologist said. Sooner, if I thought that was best.
Blind with grief, I stumbled through the labyrinthine corridors to the coronary care unit. How many dozens of times had my husband and I been in the all-too-familiar hospital? It was our second home. I called our daughter, who lived an hour away and had visited almost every day.
My husband was awake and straining to free himself from the tube in his throat. I told him he could choose to be taken off the ventilator after our daughter arrived. But, I emphasized, that would mean saying goodbye. I asked if that was what he wanted.
Soon, he signaled yes with his eyes.
I asked again to be sure.
A nurse arrived with extra sedation to protect him from pain and panic when the breathing tube was removed. I felt as if I’d lied to him because I didn’t know how drugged he would be. Friends and family members appeared. By the time our daughter reached his bedside, he could no longer respond to a hand squeeze or blink his eyes—we had robbed him of the chance to say goodbye
We held him and told him we loved him. Our daughter, not a disbeliever like me, sang “Come Unto Him” from Messiah, her soprano voice at first wavering and then brave as she reached “All ye who labor and are weary.” Doctors and nurses congregated to listen. Every nerve in my body prayed to whatever power might respond, Please let him hear her. Simultaneously, I pleaded to the sedation, Please stop his pain, even if that means he won’t know we’re here.
A nurse disconnected monitors, the feeding and hydration tubes, the ventilator last. Gently, as if he were a baby bird, she fitted an oxygen mask on him. I prayed again, this time to him: as you leave us, may your journey, like the one my brother almost took, bring you peace.
His breathing shallowed. Within a minute he was gone.
I understood what reason could not explain. He was nearby, not yet a memory. He could not return. However ephemeral his visit had been the night before, it was as real as my life. Deep in my heart or wherever emotions reside, the still-palpable feeling of him lying weightless on top of me, his hair caressing my face, would forever be our goodbye.