To Wake

[The new day—and year—leaping in through the window, to great surprise]

With the annoying buzz of an alarm, and often these days driven frantically by a straining bladder demanding to be drained, I swim achingly up out of the bottomless sea of nightly unconsciousness, the light appearing first as a dim shimmering, then a fuzzy beacon, finally the illuminated crispness of reality. 

For an instant, uncertainty as to whether I’ll be able to break through the barrier, and then it is sundered.  I surge upward, exploding from the depths. 

What is this unexpected grace?  How can it be?  Alive?  Again?!  

In Mexico, when a friend beholds you coming down the street, he invariably greets you with “!Que milagro!”—What a miracle!—even if he just saw you a few days earlier.  The meaning is literal there, so far as I can tell by the animation of speakers who have uttered those words to me.  What an utter and astounding surprise to find you still here!  Thank God, you are not dead yet!  The purest, unalloyed joy just to see the friend’s face, still animated and uninhabited by worms, above ground, breathing, emoting, living. 

They have discovered a profound truth.  This should be our feeling every morning.  Rarely, I achieve it, inexplicably bursting through the crust of habituation and the general human drag away from astonishment and marvel, through no effort or credit of my own.  On blessed days, mornings kissed by the holy, it just descends upon me, this joyous awareness that I have not perished in the unsoundable depths of the night.  What an overwhelming relief to still be alive.  To have successfully navigated another journey through Lethe, through the stillness that is to all appearances indistinguishable from death save for the slight rise and fall of the chest and the intake and exhalation of air that is its cause.  The rushing back in of consciousness is for all that nearly identical, according to my perceptual palette at least, to an actual return from the dead. 

Try, just try to imagine all the things that could have gone wrong in the night as you slept but didn’t.  All the many, so many things that could have gone awry and caused your demise. 

Your heart could have just stopped, for no easily explicable reason whatsoever.  This happens with a frequency one perhaps does well to avoid thinking about too much.  Every thirty seconds or so, someone in America dies of heart disease.  Three hundred fifty thousand die every year because their hearts just abruptly cease working, without advance warning, seemingly without cause, at least until autopsy.  It is relatively uncommon for young, healthy people to turn in on a given night and then just fail to wake, but this is little comfort for those of us for whom youth is gone and for whom the dreadful probability rises every year, every month, every week, every night. 

The disappearance into the sleep of death, a terror for us since the day we became aware that a finitude, a final, unappealable end comes for each of us, and therefore for the one thinking the thought too.  The night, the blackness, the quiet, the absence, all thick with foreboding and secrets and the most basic and unmitigated of our fears.  Songs and tales by the fire before the coming of the nightly tempting of destiny were our means to warm our souls as our bodies against the chill of the void. 

Mysterious, terrifying, perhaps death in the night is to do with some structural defect unimagined, something you never knew about and indeed never would have learned about unless it killed you, in which case you still never learn about it precisely because it did bring your end, and others are left to be introduced to the occluded and fatal fact, and then to dread its possible presence in their own bodies, lurking, waiting for the propitious time to strike.  Perhaps wholly inexplicable, a failure in the electric system of the cardiovascular system.  Random lethality.  No sense whatever.  Here, asleep, pleasantly and warmly wrapped in blankets and dreams, and then abruptly gone, forever, eternally.

Death can come otherwise.  The house could catch fire and violently shatter your blissful peace to face the nightmare of a trapped and tortured conclusion to your life’s drama, your lungs filling and suffocating on smoke as black as the night engulfing it, your skin blistering and then melting in the seconds of shattering pain that seem as eternities before the blissful nothing finally returns to retrieve you from your brief interlude among the conscious. 

The tree in the front yard could blow over in a storm and land at precisely the right angle on the roof of your house to come crashing against your head and strike you instantly into permanent quietus in your slumber so quickly as to not even allow your ears to capture the sound of the collapse of the structure of the edifice you believed would shelter you from such events. 

You could accidentally leave the car running in the attached garage, with the door open, allowing the carbon monoxide from the exhaust to penetrate into the house and block your red blood cells from absorbing and transporting oxygen, and thus your brain will be arrested in its activity, perhaps right in the middle of a tantalizingly beautiful nocturnal vision, your last, about wafting gently upward on a carpet of glowing cloud toward a distant and mysterious mountain range. 

It is morbid to reflect on these things, I am informed by one who loves me dearly.  I cannot criticize her instincts.  But she has missed the elation behind my attention to such thoughts. 

For if I awoke, then the awful thing did not happen, and in enumerating some of the ways it could have taken place but did not, I am not dwelling on the horrible entity.  I am expressing my otherwise incommunicable gratitude to have somehow, by the grace of a mysterious but evidently beneficent God avoided these various ends.  I am sending a thankful prayer to probability for having fallen on my side.  For having won the dice roll. 

This time.  Another time, perhaps I will not be so lucky.  At some point, inevitably so.  Inexorably, unavoidably, with dreadful certainty, my time will run out. 

But today, as the photons of the sun’s light burn into my eyes, I am, just this one more time, awake. 

I live!