Sleeping Single
The size of your bed can reveal a deeply meaningful story.
Since I moved a year ago, I've been tallying reactions to my new sleeping arrangements. Friends enter my minuscule condo, and within seconds, the single bed triggers a lively debate. The results are nearly unanimous. Single bed gets one vote (me). Double bed wins.
My downsizing is larger than the bed; it's part of a house swap in which I moved to a North End condo, owned by my daughter Caitlin and her husband, Dan. They now occupy a home in the suburbs where my family lived for 30 years. The transition reflects my adaptation to a single life that I inherited when my husband died.
Four years ago today, Jerry went to bed, blessedly unaware of the finality of ordinary evening rituals. His last words to me were not ones to be captured in needlepoint. They were about his other love - football. The previous night he had stayed up till midnight to watch the Patriots beat the Denver Broncos. A day later, I worried how tired he still must be.
"At least they won," I commented. "You must be glad you hung in till the end."
"Donna, that's why they won!"
I laughed at his preposterous humor, and we said goodnight for the last time. The next morning, instead of hearing an alarm and a sleepy command to "Hit snooze," I was at the local ER, listening to a young physician describing a fatal heart attack in an apparently healthy 50-year-old.
The bed documented our partnership. Jerry grinningly referred to it as the "conjugal bed," sure to tease disgusted looks and rolled eyes from teenage daughters. After he died, I occupied it for three years, strategically spreading newspapers over the emptiness, devouring bowls of ice cream, and trying to reframe my husband's absence as a windfall of additional space.
When Jerry and I met 23 years ago, I had three young daughters and my bedroom was off-limits. As our relationship developed, I was introduced to the brass bed in his condo. When we married and consolidated households in 1988, Jerry brought the bed, along with a big heart, quick wit, and generous soul. Like our personalities, our body temperatures were opposite: me luxuriating in summer heat, he sweating profusely before he'd even left the house on an August day. In the sack on a winter's night, I would cling to him. As I inched closer and closer, Jerry accused me of leaving him no room. I denied it. To prove his point one night, he leapt out of bed, circled it, and climbed in on my side. There, he stretched out in a triumphant pose, pleased to have made his case.
Then there was the time we economized on a family vacation and shared a room with my (now our) three daughters. One by one during the night, they crawled into bed with Jerry and me, until a resounding thud woke us. We found Jerry on the floor, wedged between the bed and the wall. Like a small child gripped by a giggling fit in church, I couldn't stop laughing. It was one of those slapstick moments that chronicled our quest for balance in those early days, both as a couple and as a family of five. The effort required continual calibration, yet in the end, room in the bed did not correlate with room in our hearts. There was plenty of love to go around.
A bed represents different phases of life, from the controversial "family bed" for young parents to the physical separation of elderly couples with deteriorating health. Our beds tell stories more deeply meaningful than the sleep and sex they typically connote.
Perhaps this explains the reactions to my single bed. A practical piece of furniture for a small space turns out to be a touchstone for people's feelings, fears, and fantasies. We crave happy endings, a comforting promise of pairs, rooted in the account of Noah's Ark and fulfilled in film and fiction. Yet coupling is not a commodity that can be packaged and distributed like pharmaceuticals or fashions. I've been told that I deserve better. I know it's directed at my decor, but I can't help thinking, "I've had better; in fact, I've had the very best."
Donna Milmore lives in Boston. Send comments to coupling@globe.com. 