Illustration by Dola Sun
Sometimes it’s the creak of the stairs, but usually it’s my phone notifications from the back door. Unlock. Lock again. The oldest kid is finally home. It’s just after midnight, and my phone charges on my nightstand, ready to notify me of all the things. “Don’t sleep with your phone in your bedroom” was terrific advice for me at 40, and it will be equally terrific advice for me at 60. But now at 50 with two teenagers? Forget about it.
In the kitchen, cabinets open and close. A bag of chips from one cabinet, a bowl from another. I can read my son’s thoughts through the walls. Is there ice cream? The freezer opens, the carton lifts, the utensil drawer slides open. I hear the low clack of spoons as he roots through. Ice cream needs the right spoon.
A few minutes later, the bathroom door, located just outside my bedroom, closes. Those damn squeaky hinges. Then it’s the faucet in the bathroom sink, which also squeaks. Eventually, there’s a light footfall on the steps upstairs. At 17, my oldest has finally taken to heart that being quiet leads to less rage from his parents.
Downstairs, in the room next to mine, the 15-year-old may or may not be asleep. She also knows, in theory, to keep it down. But the bathroom door will likely close again. The squeaky faucet again.
When I look back over this time in my life, it will surely be the night sounds I remember. I tell my ears to stand down. To only rouse for a smoke alarm or a tornado warning siren. Middle-aged bodies don’t listen. Or rather, all they do is listen.
I hear my son settling upstairs. Why are so many things so hard for him right now? “You won’t solve it,” I say inside my head. I might say it quietly aloud, too. I don’t have to worry about waking my husband. He’s upstairs in his room. (We’ve always had separate rooms, even when we lived together while dating. Don’t read into it.)
Actually, I never have to worry about being the one who wakes anyone in the night. I scoot quietly along wood floors whenever I get up. I pull my door shut in a way perfectly calculated to make no noise when the latch catches the strike plate. Growing up in a house with nine people, I learned that you don’t draw attention to yourself when the world is supposed to be sleeping.
Everything is OK. I repeat this like a mantra. We’re all in our beds now. Even the cat is probably nestled in the crook of the old couch in the basement. No one is fumbling around drunk or high off pills they acquired via Snapchat. There is no threat tonight. But still my body remembers. Listens. Just in case.
I’ve filled my bedroom with calming noises. A fan, obviously, because menopause is not survivable without one. And an air purifier that no longer works as an air purifier but instead serves as my white noise machine.
For the seven years I lived on Madison Road in Oakley, I never needed these things. All night, the sounds of voices and traffic and buses were my soothing urban soundtrack. Back then, in my twenties and early thirties, I wasn’t afraid of the night sounds. They let me know my place in the world. I was among the hustle, on my way, establishing myself as a grown-up so that I could someday…what? Lie awake at 1 a.m. in the suburbs filled with worry about the future?
To help me sleep, I’ve already taken 20 mg of hydroxyzine, prescribed by my doctor when I told her a year ago about the sleep anxiety that sometimes finds me. It’s one of those legacy allergy meds with temporary calming properties. I realized when I held the tiny pill for the first time last year that it was likely the same thing the pediatrician had prescribed for me in fifth grade, when I had so much anxiety about school and couldn’t stop crying every morning.
For years, I wondered what it was I’d taken that fall month of 1984. I don’t know if it helped. Now, it mostly keeps the adrenaline from surging at 2 o’clock in the morning.
I’ve also already read a few chapters of my book: Taylor Jenkins Reid or Fredrik Backman or the Ina Garten memoir. My brain is tired, though. It doesn’t want to make any more meaning. Maybe my daughter has the right idea. She blasts music from her phone right next to her head. Does it drown out her thoughts?
I turn on to my right side, put an AirPod in my left ear. I listen to an Emily Henry book I’ve already read, one I don’t need to pay attention to, just to have the voice of audiobook narrator Julia Whelan wooing me to sleep. On a good night, it works. The last night sound I hear is someone telling me a story.
I find it interesting that hearing is one of the first senses to fade with age, but it’s the last one standing in the end. A dying person apparently can recognize sound up to the very last hours of life. Even if the person is unconscious, research has found that they may still be able to hear and show signs of response.
When my dad was dying in 2013, we gathered around him in his room at the nursing home. My mom, my siblings, and I all talked to him. At one point, I had left for the evening, but two of my sisters had stayed. They sat with the hospice nurse, who started talking to my dad. He had been unresponsive all day. She said she understood that he didn’t want to leave his beautiful daughters, that it must be so hard. My sister, Laura, said that she saw tears forming in my dad’s eyes.
Keep in mind, this was a man I never once saw cry. But there he was, a sunrise away from death, no part of the giant he was in our lives seemingly present any more, and the sound of voices cut still cut through.
It’s as if our bodies give us one last chance to hear what we need to hear. A friend of mine whose husband recently died after a week-long vigil with family by his side wrote a beautiful and heartbreaking post about the experience. She talked about how it made her realize she didn’t want to wait until the end to try to find peace. Exactly, I thought.
It’s why I’ve been bathing myself in healing sound lately. Literally. I’ve attended three sound baths over the last few weeks.
The first one was outside on my neighbor’s deck. It was a sticky, hot Saturday evening and a dozen of us relaxed on yoga mats as my neighbor led us through a meditation, augmented with the most amazing sounds. A deep drum I felt in my navel. Crystal singing bowls that hit like waves. The sound was everywhere, and also inside of me. Meanwhile, the world kept making sound. I heard a lawnmower a few doors down and the chirp of birds just beyond the deck. A plane may have graced the skies above.
My intention for the meditation was to embrace the idea of fresh starts. When I opened my eyes after 45 minutes of soothing sounds, I did feel like it could be the beginning of something. And then life happened.
The second sound bath was inside, part of a day-long yoga retreat in Over-the-Rhine. The sound bath portion of the day was after lunch, and I was so tired from my lack of sleep the night before that I fell asleep to what sounded like some kind of ancient horn calling in sheep. When I woke, tingly chimes played above my head. It was nice, but mostly I felt disoriented.
The third sound bath was back on my neighbor’s deck again. It was a fall evening, with a deepening sapphire sky. My neighbor talked about the collective power of a group, even a small one like ours. We did a water meditation, accompanied by a rain drum. The sound made me feel like I was floating, the same way watching a movie in IMAX makes you feel like you’re in it.
I was the sound. The sound was me. It felt like 1,000 plinking crystals, and I wanted to hold on to it as long as I could. I opened my eyes briefly, taking in the darkness.
I understood, then, these were also night sounds. And that there was no telling what my body would hold on to. If there was a chance it would take my instruction, I would tell it to remember the great hope it represents to lie under a full moon with a group of strangers, listening to a drum that sounds like water and thinking of peace.
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