Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep

The evening ritual of saying a bedtime prayer with my father was always something I looked forward to as a child. We would kneel together at the bedside, elbow-to-elbow, enjoying this special time together.

One night, when I was four years old, the bedtime prayer was going to be different. Dad had agreed that he would be there with me as always, but I would recite the prayer alone.

After tiptoeing into the room I shared with a younger brother, I stopped at the head of my bed. Dad came in right behind me and, as he did each night, knelt and rested his elbows on the Norwegian duvet that covered the single bed. When I took my place beside him, the one to his left and by the pillow at the head of the bed, joy and excitement made thoughts of solemn prayer difficult. Trying as best I could to be still, I stretched my five-year-old body to reach a spot where my elbows would be next to his. As our arms touched, mine tiny and shaking next to his strong and still forearm, we looked in each other’s eyes and grinned. I clung to his every word and movement.

“Are you ready?” he asked with a wink of his eye as we settled in for our bedtime prayer.

Then he leaned toward me, and placing his right index finger to his lips whispered, “your brother’s sleeping, so say the prayer quietly.”

“Will God hear me if I say the prayer quietly?” I asked as he caressed my cheek.

He smiled.

“Yes, God hears our prayers even when we whisper because he knows what’s in our hearts.”

“How can he?”

“Because He’s God,” my father replied then draped his arm around my shoulder and held me tight.

I loved being close to my father, and if he knew about God, then I wished to know God too, and wanted both of them to be proud of me.

“Can I start?” I asked, barely containing my excitement.

He rubbed my back and said, “Remember, softly so we don’t awaken Douglas.”

“If I forget a part will you help me?”

“Of course I will, but you’ll be fine.”

I watched then imitated his every move, the way he folded his hands and bowed his head. Taking a deep breath as he had, I began: 

Now I lay me down to sleep

I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

If I should die before I wake,

I pray the Lord my soul to take.

Many nights, after he’d tucked me in, I lay in the dark, anxious and wondering what if I should die before I wake meant. I wanted to wake up in the morning, go to school, play and be with my friends—I didn’t want to die in my sleep. My fears were allayed not by the prayer’s request I pray the Lord my soul to take, but by the touch and presence of my strong and loving father. If this would be the last time we’d be together, I wondered if God would be like him.

Forty years later, eight friends and family sat around the small breakfast nook table in my parent’s home. Off to the side on a simple hospice bed, but close enough to be among us, lay my dying father. The morphine drip-line inserted in his left arm was to ease the pain caused by the cancer he and my mother had prayed to God for a miraculous cure. Those of us gathered around the table shared stories, nibbled at finger food, laughed and cried, and watched for signs of recognition from him, or indications that death had come and he’d gone to be with his Lord.

His ever vigilant hospice care-giver, in starched white smock, sat across the room in silence. She occasionally raised her eyes from the book she was reading to watch and listen for signs from her patient. “If we don’t hear bowel sounds,” she’d earlier announced, holding up the stethoscope now draped around her neck, “we’ll know he’s passed.”

With no premeditation on my part, no scripted plan, I walked to the kitchen counter, picked up a clean serving dish, filled it with warm water, and draped a fluffy washcloth and hand-towel over my shoulder. I carried them the short distance to my father’s bedside. His eyes opened as I placed the bowl, cloth, and towel on the tray table next to the plastic cup and straw for which he no longer had any use.

“I’m going to bathe you, Dad,” I whispered, “okay?”

He moved his lips but made no sound. Although he’d closed his eyes, I thought he smiled, and as he raised his hand and stroked my bare forearm a tear rolled down his cheek.

I gently placed my arm beneath his shoulders and began to lift him into a sitting position. He tightened the grip on my forearm, and with a slight rotation of his head motioned for me to come closer. As my ear touched his lips he murmured, “It’s all right. I love you, son.”

Someone, I don’t remember who but perhaps my mother or brother, came to help me hold him and remove the hospice “johnny” gown that loosely covered his now slender body.  I began washing and caressing him with the soothing cloth, and then gently dabbed the warm water from his frail and weary body.

It had been decades since I’d thought about the bedtime prayers my father and I had shared, but as I moved my hand over his naked body, the memory of those times and the prayer returned. The lines “…if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take” were altered, and no longer perplexing to me as I repeatedly said to the Great Mystery—if he should die before he wakes, I pray you Lord his soul to take.

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