[Photo – left – Unmade Bed, 1957, By Imogen Cunningham]
Sunday night, as I entered our comfortable bed, my wife already asleep, I found myself thinking of people around our community climbing into their beds. I thought of the children who wish the sheets under which they slept would somehow protect them from being beaten in the middle of the night; of the women who enter uncertain sleep with the same kind of fear – the terror of never knowing when their journey will be interrupted by sudden cruelty; of the mentally ill, invisible voices shaking their rest, wolf-shadows circling in and out of their consciousness.
I thought of people who climb into no bed at all, but simply fall to the ground beneath a highway overpass, in the shallow woods behind a gas station, or on the edges of a park….
There are those who have been in bed all day so that bed time is simply a change in the light.
They lie beneath the fluorescent glow of a hospital room, machines pumping air in and out of their lungs, monitors beeping, IV lines draping them like swamp vines.
I thought of the people going to bed for the last time. Some of those will sleep their last night in a wonderful place called Alive Hospice, cared for by angels dressed as nurses and doctors and social workers and housekeepers.
I remember the last time my father, who put me to bed so many times as a child, went to bed for the last time himself. Hospice staff brought to his home a hospital bed that very day. He was conscious enough to know what was happening. As soon as he saw the bed, he said softly to my younger sister, "Oh, no." But he knew he didn’t want to leave this earth in the bed he had slept in with my mother for sixty years. The hospital bed made him feel safe to leave this earth. He passed away only hours after climbing into that sleeping space by himself.
Bed is a comfort for most of us. But as I thought about those for whom bed can be a place of fear, I wondered if it helps those in need for us to think about them. Does it matter to the abused, the homeless, the sick, and the dying that they are in our thoughts as we travel toward sleep?
Perhaps it doesn’t. What matters is what we do when we wake the following morning. Will the day inspire in us toward the decision to help? Can we ease the discomfort of even one person before we return to our own place of sleep tonight?
Bed companies love to advertise the comfort of their mattresses. But true comfort arrives only in a bed that is safe, warm, surrounded with Love.
-Erie Chapman
Journal of Sacred Work 
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