Sleeping patterns

Bern is an 'early to bed, early to rise' person. It's just past 9:30 and she's in bed. She'll read awhile but then sleep.

I seldom go to bed before midnight, sometimes at 11;30. And normally I sleep--unless I get up for a Sunday service or a meeting--to 9 or so.

Bern approves. She likes an hour or two to drink a pot of coffee and get ready for her day.

I'm an irrepressible 'morning person', because I sleep late. That would drive her crazy at 7 a.m. So I sleep in.


I wake up many mornings at 5 or so, but go back to sleep. Even if I wake up at 6 or so to go pee, I go back to sleep.

But the last few weeks when I wake up like that, I can sometimes not go back to sleep.

I have no problem 'dozing' for an hour or two, but I haven't, recently, gone back to deep sleep.

Just an hour or so ago I realized why.

For 13 years, if I got up to go to the bathroom or just woke up, I'd rub Bela, our Puli dog, until I slept again. He was between us in our huge bed and easy to reach.

Now he's not there to rub, so I need to find something else to help me sleep some more.

(I promise that soon I'll stop writing about him--maybe after we scatter his ashes on the canal down the hill from us on Cornwall Avenue where we walked him all those years. But for now, I can't stop. Ponder anything that was in your life and you loved for 13 + years and tell me you moved on immediately....Ponder that.)

Tonight, for the first time, I took the plastic bag with his ashes out of the container they are in, sitting beside my desk. I hadn't been able to look at them before. I held them in my hands and mourned. Two pounds of ashes of a 60 pound dog.

I'm waiting for Bern to tell me when we can scatter then. She said, 'after Easter', but I'm not sure when that will be.

As much as I mourn for him, she mourns more. I know that.

I'll wait for her to say 'when', though I think it would be cathartic to scatter them. I do.

But I'll wait for her.