We were staying at my aunt's house and there were too many people or not enough beds.  I slept on the couch, or tried to: the seat cushions angled down into the backrest and it was hard getting comfortable.  Any movement, a stretch, a juggling of joints, and gravity dragged me into that downward slope.  The pull back and down required constant resistance and a delicate arrangement of limbs that reminded me of being ill, when you're  afraid to move because moving sends the pain screaming on a roller-coaster of a ride along splintered nerve-tracks.  And the couch was narrow, like the berth I once slept in on a boat: the roll into the backrest was a lopsided, half-rock over waves of frustration. 

The next night I tried a new tack, nestling into the long, backward, downward angle as though it were the lengthy presence of some lost lover.  But the inability to move gripped my shoulders so tightly I couldn't sleep, making me tired and sore the next day.  And so on the third night, after my grandmother was asleep and with a sneaky disregard for her displeasure, I took the cushions and slept on the floor; its level reassurance was a comfort.  The metallic music of my sisters' cot springs and the faintly asthmatic snoring of my aunt's small dog was a strange and ridiculous lullaby that gentled me into dreams, those strange and ridiculous alibis.

Other times we came to visit, times when my aunt wasn't in the hospital, I worried about how she never seemed to sleep.  She said she couldn't, the poisons in her body wouldn't let her. So she took baths, sometimes two or three a night, partly to calm her pains, partly to fill the hours.  She wandered between bathroom and kitchen, wakeful and completely alone in her dis-ease: a danse seul, an insomniac's dance to the syncopated night music of running water, cupboard castanets and the pulsing shunt in her wrist.

Some nights I  sat with her at the kitchen table.  We drank tea and talked softly.  She told me things about my dead mother and tried to get me to make plans.  The history of us: her carrying the toddler me in her arms down the platform at the railway station in Colfax, me swinging my legs from the edge of the seat in the beauty parlor watching her perm blue and lavender hair and eagerly listening to the gossip, her going back to school and reading me an Allen Ginsberg poem with a puzzled and humorous look on her face, the times we laughed so hard we couldn't talk - too many stories to tell.  The torturous and trivial entwined us. We knew each other's laughs and looks; our skins were familiar, familial.  I wanted to pull her into a rocking chair, cradle her in my arms and rock her tired body until she drifted into dreams - slowly, gently.

Not how she was drifting now, attached by wires and tubes to that shipwreck of a hospital bed, the sheets like worthless sails. Each hour took her some further unfathomable distance our stretched arms could never reach.  Her bloated body barely looked like her and she was drowning in it.  We were there to say good bye, but our words were only the ashes falling from flaming arrows of grief as we watched her from the shore, a Viking funeral party.

We drove home along the lake and I thought about that yellow bathing suit she used to wear, the one that looked like a bikini in back, but the front had a strip of fabric connecting the top and bottom.  She was sunny in it.  I wish I could tell you how real and loving and fun she was.  When I say she was simple I mean uncomplicated and true.  Her exasperation had no sharp edges - she was angry, frustrated, confused or hurt, but never mean or spiteful.  She had a knack for delight and when she found it she didn't hoard it, she wanted to share it right away. She was always ready to be happy.

In the summer evening the lawns of my aunt's cul de sac glowed with a deep green mystery: how could it all be so normal?  The flowers tucked in their beds, the cars in their driveways, the neighbors making their settling-in porch light rounds were all part of the mocking parallel universe we now inhabited.  We talked late into the night, telling stories.  Later, when everyone went to sleep, I remember feeling a sad relief for the end to my aunt's insomnia.