Most people share a bed but everybody sleeps alone. Sleep, like death, is a door you can only go through on your own.
During the final week in which I was working as a priest, I was called to a suburban motel in the middle of the morning because a woman had woken that day to find her husband dead in the bed beside her. The pair had been married for fifty years and never slept apart. They had travelled together and, every year, made a pilgrimage to Melbourne for the Spring Racing Carnival where they always stayed in the same room at the same inexpensive motel. It was a second home to them, so much so that once they had found the previous year’s form guide under the bed, where it had remained undisturbed for twelve months.
‘I didn’t worry,’ said the woman. ‘I mean, why pay for cleaning you don’t need?’
They were a devoted, if eccentric, couple. The receptionist who greeted me said that the woman was coping with remarkable composure: around 8 am, she had rung the front office and asked if it were too late to change the order for two breakfasts to one breakfast.
‘May I ask why,’ replied the receptionist, concerned that the guests could have had a problem with the food.
‘Oh, it’s just that my husband is dead in the bed.’
A doctor was called, who duly pronounced that the husband must have slipped off his mortal coil ‘about half past one’.
‘I don’t think so,’ said the woman. ‘I was watching TV. I would have noticed.’
Then they called me, the priest, and I was asked to sit a few minutes with the body while the widow slipped into the little bathroom to apply her makeup.
‘Thanks for waiting,’ she said. ‘But I want to look my best. You can put the TV on if you want although there’s not much on at the moment, I don’t think. I was channel surfing before you arrived.’
Twenty minutes later she emerged and announced that her husband looked better than he had for years. We were getting ready to start the prayers, when somebody arrived to service the room.
‘Would you mind coming back to make the bed later,’ said the widow.
‘Sure. No problem.’
‘I’m afraid my husband is still in bed.’
‘No problem. I’ll come back later.’
‘We may need fresh sheets.’
We kneeled by the bedside and, as we prayed, the woman reached across and held the hand of her dead husband, a gesture I found comforting despite the fact that it wasn’t supposed to be me who needed comfort. It was the first sign that the body in the bed was anything more to her than a stage prop. Later, I tried to suggest to her that she might be in shock because someone so familiar to her, who’d shared her bed for fifty years, had just slipped away without so much as a backward glance, without even ruffling the sheets.
‘That,’ she replied, ‘is the sign of a really good mattress.’
These events struck me as a little odd and yet, as I mentioned the story to others, I heard a number of accounts of people waking to find a dead partner in the bed beside them, although nobody else had encountered a bereaved person with the presence of mind to ring room service to cancel a breakfast that wouldn’t be required. Dying in your sleep sounds like the perfect solution to a tricky problem, but it can be troubling for those who were attached to you but didn’t notice you go. Some things are hard to figure. There are people who can be crippled with pain by an ingrown toenail and others who will reach the final stages of liver cancer without developing a single symptom. Some people leave this life with less fuss than they leave a carpark. When J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan first appeared in novel form in 1911, it was called Peter and Wendy and included the controversial line: ‘to die will be an awfully big adventure.’ Bedford’s original illustration uses this line as a caption to a picture of Peter looking out across a beautiful sea. The waters are perfectly still.
Sleep can be a profound form of absence. That’s why Santa and the tooth fairy and the sandman all come at night; they know that your body is in the bed but that you have yourself slipped out for a moment so they can do their thing.
Some years ago, I received a call from the Essendon Police Station. A homeless man had wandered into the station and handed my wallet across the counter. I thanked the officer but told him that this was impossible as my wallet was in my beside drawer where I had put it the night before.
At the time I was living in a terrace house belonging to a religious community. My bedroom was upstairs and at the back: access was provided by a flight and a half of creaky stairs; the door was tight in the jam and often it needed a shoulder to persuade it to let anyone in. The room was so small that everyone assumed it had once been servant’s quarters and that servants had been a chaste breed: a single narrow bed all but filled the space, leaving room for a wardrobe at the foot of the bed and a small table on the other side of the bed from the door. To get to the table, you had to shuffle sideways like a crab around the bed and past the wardrobe.
‘I’m sorry, officer, but that could never have happened.’
I didn’t go into the salubrious details of religious accommodation.
‘It must belong to someone else,’ I concluded.
Just to be sure, I went upstairs to check. My keys were in the drawer where I had put them. So were my sunglasses. This was the place I emptied my pockets every night. If I ever wore cufflinks, I suppose they would have been there too. And a mobile phone, if they’d been invented yet. But the wallet was gone. I rang the officer back.
‘The man says he got the wallet during the night from an upstairs room at the back of a terrace house.’
‘I think I need to come and see it.’
It turns out that the man had been into the room in the small hours, slipped around the bed and pilfered the wallet while I was asleep. I never noticed a thing.
‘Where were you all this time?’ asked the officer.
‘I was in the bed.’
‘Asleep?’
‘Dead to the world.’
‘You may as well have been anywhere.’
‘I suppose.’
The officer suggested that the priests could use this story in their recruitment campaigns to tell people what a blissful life we led, undisturbed by pangs of conscience. The problem was that I was the only person in the house who did sleep well.
‘I don’t know how the chap knew to look in that room,’ I said to one of my brethren.
‘He just followed the snoring.’