At four-thirty sharp every morning, my eyes fly open, I‘m wide awake. This morning I look over at the digital clock that is large and glowing, and it is blinking 12:00. Oh, oh, it seems as if the power went out again. We must have had another electrical thunderstorm. Wonder, what time it is? I make a bet with myself that it is four-thirty in the morning.

I blindly make my way over to the bathroom and flip the light quickly on and off, long enough to see the alarm clock. It has a backup battery. I win or lose, depending on whether I’m feeling optimistic or pessimistic at any given moment. It is indeed 4:30 am. My inner clock has wakened me up at 4:30 am.

This had happened to me every night since August 23, 1986, when my mother passed away from a complete coronary and respiratory arrest. On that particular night, I had wakened up from a sound sleep at 4:30 am and knew my mother passed.

At five am the aide, Doris, who was staying with my mother during the week, called to let me know that my mother had died. The ambulance arrived at the house to take her to the hospital, but of course, I was too late.

Doris, the aide, thought my mother’s refusal to have the air conditioner on or any of the windows open had precipitated her death. It was the hottest August 23^rd in the recorded weather history of NJ up to this time. I had a new air conditioner put in my mother’s room, early in the spring. She had mid-stage dementia. And she was sometimes argumentative and combative.

Her disease had caused a radical change in her personality. Formerly a shy and quiet woman that spent her time saying the rosary, reading from her prayer book, and for excitement, she read the Reader’s Digest.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention she was completely blind for the past ten years from glaucoma. She became a paranoid and terrified woman who called me ten times a day to tell me someone was breaking into the house to steal her money, or that someone was hiding behind the living room chair, and smoking pot.

Before I realized what was going on with her, I used to sneak over to her house and peak in the living window to see if someone was hiding behind the rocking chair in the living room. Of course, there never was. Sometimes she called the police. And then they would call me. And I would assure them that she was somewhat senile, and I would be over shortly to check on her. 

My mother suffered these delusions for three years before I was able to get her to agree to go to a psychiatrist who specialized in sedating senile patients into submission, or as in her case, sleeping away the rest of her life. Subdued.

But that day, she had refused to take the sedative and was acting delusional and stubborn. There wasn’t much left of her. But what was there was stubborn when she wanted to be.

I waited until seven in the morning to call the rest of my family, and they were all upset that I hadn’t called them earlier, as if it would have made any difference. She was buried four days later at Calvary Cemetery, next to my dad, who had passed away from lung cancer eight months earlier, after a short battle of eight months, the longest months of my life.

The day is quite long when you wake up at 4:30 every morning.  Sometimes the days seem to run one into the other. This day would be no different. I was exhausted when I fell into bed, into a deep sleep, at ten pm. A little tomato juice and Temazepam paved the way for a few hours of uninterrupted sleep.

It was Sunday night, I had a full week ahead of me, but thanks to Mama’s little helper, I fell asleep ten minutes after my head hit the pillow, and didn’t wake up until eight-thirty the following morning. I woke up slowly. The room seemed different somehow, oh I realized it was daylight and not the usual pitch dark I wake up to. I had slept the entire night. I thought this is going to be a good week.