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Nonfiction Memoir

When the nightmares began

Shortly after my dad died, I began sleepwalking and experiencing night terrors

drawing (sketch) of a bed
Artwork by Jeffrey Pillow. “Bed from Childhood.” CC BY SA

Two years ago, I began seeing a counselor to talk about my struggles with anxiety and a lingering depression I’d never addressed after my dad died.

I stood at the edge of a cliff. Little pebbles of rock crumbled and fell underfoot. I’d been inching closer for some time. Would I allow the weight I carried to decide my fall, or would I lighten my load and step back from the edge?

You haven’t fallen until you’ve fallen…

I.

PETER—That’s my counselor’s name. Less than ten minutes after I met him, I balled my eyes out, crying in front of someone who was more or less a complete stranger in khakis who sat a mere five feet from me in a leather executive chair.

I told Peter of a dream I had never told anyone up until that point. It was a dream that began the first night I went to sleep after my dad died. It wasn’t a dream initially. Its origin was a nightmare.

II.

A nightmare you can’t wake from

On May 21, 2009, God had found an exposed stitch and pulled the thread that created my life and had held it together for so long, feeding me, clothing me, putting a roof over my head, teaching me.

The phone rang.

It was 1 a.m. My sister’s voice.

“Jeff, you need to come down to Duke now. I’m leaving now too. Call me when you get there.”

Four hours later, I walk into the front entrance of Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina. The automatic doors open at the lobby and there stands my aunt Gloria.

“Hurry. Let’s get up to your dad’s room. He doesn’t have much time. He is waiting for you before he says goodbye.”

I don’t know what I expected when I arrived at Duke. A part of me knew what awaited. It was the piece of me which peered into my closet just four hours before wondering whether I should pack for my dad’s funeral. Another part of me, the part which had driven all this way, refused to believe it, the piece of me which still held onto some thread of hope. The piece of me that had walked to the entrance at Duke and was now met by the truth.

This was it.

He is waiting for you before he says goodbye…

Whatever I expected, what I saw wasn’t it.

Upstairs, I place my dad’s hand in mine. An involuntary squeeze comes from his hand. Do you know I am here? Do you know? His chest moves up and down rapidly. His eyes roll back in his head.

III.

“I feel like I am being punished for something,” he once told me. It was a month before. We were walking through the parking lot of a satellite UVA medical center in Charlottesville where I had taken him to have his platelet count checked and another procedure involving plasma, if I recall correctly.

Cancer is indifferent, I remember thinking.

I never asked him what he thought that “something” was. Most all of us have done what we may consider, in our own right, unspeakable sins—many of which are actually minor in the grand scheme of sins committed in the world.

It didn’t matter anyway. Cancer kills saints and sinners alike. It doesn’t care who you are or what you have done, good or bad. Cancer is just an abnormal cell with the sole purpose of creating more abnormal cells. That is its mission. That is its purpose.

IV.

At his bedside, I glance at his forearms. Flakes of skin rest in the tiny hairs that still remain. He always had such strong forearms. They look strong even in his current state. I used to hang like a monkey from my dad’s forearms when I was a small child.

“You are a good dad. I love you,” I say and have to stop, a paralyzed sadness grips my words mid-air and crumbles the syllables, scattering them to the floor.

On a screen behind his bed, green lines go up and down, steady. His chest is moving in a measured rhythm, air forced into and out of his lungs. It’s unnatural. I stand there with tears in my eyes, his hand in mine. You are a good dad. Do you know that? Thank you for raising me the way you did. I love you.

I’m not sure if I say this aloud or only to myself. It’s as if I am having an out-of-body experience, watching myself stand over my dad as death waits patiently for me to step away.

I walk out of the room and to a bathroom nearby and have diarrhea. My mind hasn’t stopped since my sister called. I can hear the beeps as I sit on the toilet, then the sound of a long line—BEEEEEEEEEEEP—then footsteps and nurses and doctors with panicked voices. No, the voices aren’t panicked. The voices are hyper-focused, vigilant in their duties. This is routine for them. Then a knock on the door of the bathroom.

“Jeff, are you in there? He’s dying now. Come out and say bye one last time.”

And I start crying, blubbering, alone, as my dad’s soul leaves his body fifteen feet away as I sit on the toilet. And I remember being so mad I have to wipe my behind. A deep anger, almost seething that I still have the capability and physical strength to wipe my own ass.

BEEEEEEEEEEEP

Then the beeping stops. The machines have done their job—calculating levels, recording measurements. Now they are off.

My dad’s mouth is open and his head is positioned slightly upward. His eyes are open. Then they aren’t. Then his mouth is closed. His head in a normal resting position. The doctor steps away.

V.

When the nightmares began

The nightmares began immediately.

Some mornings I’d wake up next to the fireplace or at the back door on the cold gray tile, shivering. One morning I woke and noticed the backdoor ajar. The bolt had caught, so it was still locked but a tiny opening of about four inches let a morning breeze inside.

Had I left in the middle of the night and come back? Another night I woke in a panic. I thought I was locked in a trunk or a coffin. It was pitch black. My heart raced and I began slamming the meaty part of my fist like a hammer against my enclosure.

The surface felt familiar, raised. As my senses returned, I realized I had walked in my sleep into the guest bathroom and into the standing shower and shut the glass door, closing myself in.

VI.

When I was a kid, I used to sleep walk routinely. More than twenty years of my life had passed since I had last walked in my sleep. Now it happened a few nights every week. Like a small child seeking a path into the unknown.

It was a common occurrence when I was younger to have night terrors. Always the same demon threatening to kill me or the ones I loved, usually the latter. He knew I was vulnerable in this way. The demon was small but over his body swam electrocution, as if wrapped in barbed wire. He would wake me, and knowing my paralysis, would look my way, then toward my sister’s room, and grin. It was a look of pure evil. And I would scream, waking my parents—usually my mom because my dad worked third shift and wasn’t often home at night to comfort me.

VII.

Everything is going to be okay

The nightmares persisted for months. Always the same. A simple playback of the last few minutes of my dad’s life: me standing there, his hand in mine, his eyes rolling back and fluttering in the sockets, skin flaking and falling to the floor, the machines beeping, then a flatline.

Then one night the nightmares stopped.

The last nightmare turned into a dream.

I was at the hospital with my dad as I had been all the times before, but instead of the machines beeping and flatlining, they disappeared. The scene turned to white as if too much sun let into a window. When the light lessened, it was of my bedroom from childhood.

The demon had come to visit again. He smiled at me as I lay there powerless unable to stop him. He knew I couldn’t get out from under the covers, and so he walked one step after the next down the hallway toward my parents’ room. But before he could commit his deed, the overhead light in my room turned on, and it was white. So white, my room.

At my bedside was my dad. He sat on the corner of the mattress and held my hand in his. I was covered in sweat, my back straight where I lay.

All of my dad’s hair had returned and his mustache was back again, full, brown. He didn’t smell pungent like cancer. There was a scent of him I knew, one of a light sweat from how he never wore deodorant. He was young, in his early thirties, and I was young too—a small boy.

“Everything is going to be okay,” he said. “Everything is going to be okay.”

And then I woke.

7 replies on “When the nightmares began”

Jeff, I know you may not believe me when u say this, but when I was only 14 years old, my Grandmother Tharpe died. The very night before she had called me in the phone as as any teenager may do, I pulled the phone from my ear and didn’tisten to her. I was in my own little world circling the phone in the air waiting impatiently for her to finally say goodbye, the very next morning at 10:00, I got a call while I was at school saying she died of a massive heart attack. She was only 57 years old. I felt guilty for treating her the way I had the night before on the Its phone. Your dad and I were married, living in this very house when I was awakened in my sleep and there standing at the foot of my bed as clear as I am sitting here writing this comment was my Granny Tharpe telling me, ” It’ok.” I have never carried the burden of guilt from that day since.

Great read! My dad had a similar dream of my mom about a year after she passed.

I had one of her when I was in the 8th or 9th grade, and I can still hear her voice as clear as day, saying my name and telling me to wake up, it was time to go to school. I can’t describe the feeling that I had when my eyes open. I felt happy, but also heavy. It’s hard to explain.

Cancer has taken too many good people too soon.

Indeed cancer has. I get what you are saying about the dream being inexplicable yet so physically real. If you think about it, what is reality other than your own perception and interpretation, and why can’t a dream fall into the same? I took an interesting class in college called “Dreams and Visions,” and we read a thick orange book called DREAM READER. I saw it on my bookshelf last week and was again reminded of this dream about my dad and its nightmarish origins — the power of the last dream when he sat there on the edge of my bed comforting me, the almost other-dimensionality to how it made me feel.

What a gripping tale. That demon. Jesus, man. I’m sorry. That sounds horrifying and I’m sorry you ever experienced that. But that last dream, where your dad intervened – my god, that’s beautiful. Thank you for sharing all of this. <3

I can still see that demon to this day if I close my eyes. He was a frequent visitor when I was young, the source of my night terrors. He felt so real and alive and not a figment. It had been quite some time since he had last visited, and so, the dream with my dad, made it all the more eery.

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