I'll only post when i'm up with insomnia.
here's the deal. i'm a championship sleeper. if one could "medal" at sleeping, i would.
i don't like to go to sleep (because the night "wins", duh), but once i'm out, i'm out! i snore like a mutha, drool, and generally sleep through most noises and disturbances. Exceptions being when the cat starts that pre-barf hacking. That noise wakes me out of my deepest sleep and i'm on high-alert to make sure she pukes on the wood floor and not on the bed, the carpet, or me.
anyhoo, i'm normally a phenomenal sleeper. But every now and then, I'll find myself up at 3:30 (like tonight) with little desire to sleep. Ironically, sometimes the nights i try to go to sleep "early" are those when I'm up the latest.
Sometimes i can attribute these infrequent insomnia spells to stress or having a nap after work (something i work realllly hard to avoid). But other times i think it's because of what i'm reading. when i get into a book that's a real page-turner, i just seem to read past my "window" for sleep and end up awake all night. The stupid "True Blood" series had me reading well into the early hours of the morning for a few weeks. Then, it was "Shutter Island" (read it mostly in one night...then watched the trailer on the computer a few dozen times until 8am). Now, it's "Still Alice".
This little gem of a book is terrifying and compelling. It's a story about a harvard professor who discovers she's got early-onset alzheimer's at 50. It documents her rapid decline and how her illness robs her of so much of what she valued and loved about her life: teaching, writing, reading, researching, imagining a future with her children, grandchildren and husband... What sucks is that this story would be heartbreaking enough if i weren't cringing at every page. It mirrors so much of my mother-in-law's struggles with her ALS diagnosis. When you do what you love and then it's taken from you...it's just cruel. Both women were passionate about their chosen fields and both these women are having that career slowly taken away due to illness. My MIL is still one of the most physically-fit women you'll ever meet...but her ability to breathe, eat and speak is shutting down. She can no longer race, compete, or lead seminars on running.
It's not that their careers defined these women. It's that their careers reflected their intellectual and physical passions. That these illness robbed them of that....well, it's just....horrendous.
I can't bring myself to go into the other room and finish the last part of the book. I don't want to read how it "ends".
Besides, having stereo sleep-breathing from the husband and the cat in my ears...that just rubs it in that i'm wide awake.
so, i'm sad. awake. frustrated. and wishing i'd started reading that garcia-marquez book tonight instead of "Still Alice". hmph.
((NOTE: I finished this damn book only to realize it was FICTION! I probably might have not been such an emotional mess reading this book if I'd been able to tell myself it was "just a story". I don't know HOW i got the idea it was nonfiction. sheesh.))
