for Wendy

You should have written The Good Sleep Guide.
We always thought you could, with your special talent
for nodding off at the drop of an eyelid.

Once, at Gary's for dinner, when the rest of us
came back from washing up, we found you and Graham
snoozing side by side on the living room sofa.

One Christmas afternoon, it was you and Duncan, fast asleep on
each others' shoulders, while the big family movie – Raiders
of the Lost Ark? – flickered on, ignored by our small family.

You thought all restaurants should have a sleep room,
a warm, quiet place, full of sofas and scatter cushions,
where guests could snore away the effects of too much pud.

On long journeys, you'd nap in the car while I took a walk
to stretch my legs. Even that jet fighter didn't disturb you,
when it roared up the valley past our layby, banked steeply
100 feet from your sleeping face, and rolled over the hill.

Droning into the darkness over some bleak Pennine moor
on our way to your birthday mountain weekend,
you'd wake in the passenger seat for no reason:
"Oh, sorry! Was I asleep? Are you OK?"

Raymond Chandler was a favourite author, you'd even studied
him for your degree, yet you never saw The Big Sleep all the way
through. That's just how it was many evenings, you'd doze on
the settee till something jogged you, then stir and mumble:
"Mm, is it time for bed?"

You loved your bed. Snuggled down with a hot water
bottle and your Rupert Bear pyjamas, you'd exclaim:
"Bed's nice!" before turning to your book. Which
you seldom read beyond a page or two, its thud
on the floor synchronised with your head's softer
fall onto the pillow.

You had special bed glasses, cheap ones that didn't
matter if you bent the frames when you fell asleep
wearing them. As you often did.

Maybe all that sleeping was why you'd sometimes wake
in the silence of the night and then you'd worry. Worry
about your work. Worry about your sons. Worry about
your grandkids. And to drive away the worries, you'd put
the TV on. Which woke me too, so we'd watch those early
morning episodes of the Hoobs and Teletubbies
together, before we rose for work. You had no trouble
watching those to the end.

But now you don't worry any more, and you don't
wake before the dawn to watch the Hoobs. Your last
balloon finally went down, and now you sleep the sleep
of smoke and ashes in your sleepy country churchyard,
beneath the lime trees and the tombstone you share
with your mum and dad. And your sons
and grandkids visit when they can.

And now I know how your dad felt, when you helped him
choose your mum's epitaph, all those years ago.
It would almost do for you, too: "Fell
"asleep... her life a beautiful memory."
But to say that you're asleep suggests
that one day you might wake.
And I don't believe that, not at all,
and nor did you. Still, I wonder
what you'd make of this one:
"A too frequently interrupted snooze,
now resumed"?