No Saints around Here: A Caregiver’s Days

Sleeping with a Wombat

49 SLEEPING WITH A WOMBAT March 16 When I flop into my downstairs bed at night, I curl up next to my wombat. He is much smaller than an ordinary wombat—if wombats, those secretive, nocturnal Australian creatures, can ever be considered ordinary. There is much to be said for sleeping with this wombat. He is utterly tranquil. He doesn’t wake or turn uneasily when I get up at night. Although not seductively silky like a cat, his stiff, fuzzy fur is strokable. But sometimes, as I put my arms around him, I’m not always sure which end is which. His rotund pigginess makes it hard to find his tiny ears and small snout. If I’m drifting off to sleep, I can become disconcerted if I find I’m hugging his rear end. I have to turn him around before I can truly fall asleep. When I don’t have a night aide and I sleep upstairs in a bed next to James, I grab the giant-size white rabbit who perches unobtrusively on a nearby chair. I first saw Rabbit several years ago in a gift-shop window, when I was hurrying to my therapist’s office . I didn’t consult her very often then; James’s Parkinson’s was still fairly mild. I paused briefly to look at this rabbit, its floppy ears, pink nose, thick white fur, and a sweet expression, almost a half-smile, on its rabbity face. Then I caught myself: “Good sleeping with a wombat 50 grief. This is a stuffed animal. Come on. You are grown up! You don’t have any grandchildren. You don’t even know a child who would want this rabbit. You have no excuse for buying it. Move along!” The fluffy white rabbit didn’t sell. The next month, I walked tentatively into the gift shop and asked the clerk to take Rabbit out of the window. He curled up in my arms, very soft, very huggable. I didn’t want to put him down. On an impulse, I whipped out my credit card. I didn’t even try to justify the purchase to myself. When I walked into my therapist’s office, carrying a large stuffed animal, I said, a little embarrassed, “I just had to have this.” She looked at Rabbit and nodded. “I can see why,” she said. Rabbit is the perfect size for someone who sleeps on her side and wants to wrap her arm around something comforting. He is even more squeezable than Wombat, but if I’m tossing, sleepless, during the night, Wombat reminds me of a relaxed afternoon strolling through the Queen Victoria market in Melbourne, Australia . A few days before I bought Wombat, James had patiently tapped his cane through Melbourne’s sprawling, landscaped zoo so I could finally see a real wombat. I had just read a classic naturalist ’s memoir, The Secret Life of Wombats, and I was entranced. Unlike holding Rabbit, when holding my wombat, I am clinging to a lost part of my life. I did not always yearn for a stuffed animal. I had James. When we married, we added two large bedrooms onto his bachelor house, one for my teenage daughter Jenny and one for us. James planned ours carefully. We were both restless sleepers, even then, and James was a sleeper with a symphony of noises— snores, snorts, coughs, thunderous farts. Once, when we tried sleeping in the same bed, I woke up terrified in the middle of the night. “James, James!” I whispered urgently, poking him awake. “Someone is in the house! I just heard a gunshot!” James turned over and looked at me sleepily. “No,” he said calmly. “That was just me. Go back to sleep.” sleeping with a wombat 51 Our new bedroom didn’t have space for two large beds, and James didn’t mind sleeping in a twin. So I got a spacious queen next to his smaller one: “Two beds for sleeping, one for sex,” he liked to explain slyly to visitors. Most of our house has small rooms, but this one is spacious and lofty, with a high-pitched skyblue ceiling, a square window cut into it so we can see the sky. From our beds, we look out into treetops, as if we were living in the woods, not in the heart of a city. Light streams in from windows...