Nahla

 6/30/26

Nahla

One of the things that happened in the tumultuous time right after Kate died was that I forgot how to sleep.  I had no idea that was even possible -I had always been someone who tilted towards the sleep too much side -  could never stay up until midnight on New Year’s Eve, was always getting woken up by the other residents of the queer dorm tipsily belting out MacArthur Park to the point that I wanted to shove their faces in the rain-soaked cake.  I assumed that sleep was as automatic a function as breathing.  Then, with painful irony,  it disappeared at the same time as the one person I could reach for in the middle of the night, whether in person or on the phone.

 

It didn’t  really seem to matter since everything had been subsumed into a dismal grey miasma with intermittent stabbing spikes of agony. Day, night, awake, asleep, alive or not, none of it made any difference for a long time. 

 

When it finally began to clear a little, the shaky outlines of my new reality beginning to be visible through the thick clouds, I started to sleep again but like so many things it would never be the same.  Ever since then, I have listened in my sleep, monitoring the sounds of the house and the street outside – a mouse scratching in the attic, a cat puking, a drunk person singing their way down the street, slurring and out of tune – ready to spring awake and into action.  It’s like my brain is telling itself, “its only you now, it’s up to you to guard this place and the lives that reside here, purring in their sleep.”  

 

Sometimes I do react, snapping into reality in an adrenaline flooded panic, heart pounding until I can reassure myself that things are fine, someone’s just been spitting up a hairball or a neighbor coming home late has slammed a car door.  Sometimes I can’t figure out the cause at all, and I have to get up and wander around, have some water or hold a cat until things settle down.

 

I was doing that at 4am, randomly awake and having a can of seltzer, when my phone lit up with an incoming message.  When I was the Director of a shelter, late night messages were common – there would be a flood or a fight or a young person who’d just been kicked out and wanted to know if they could come stay.  It’s much less common these days,  and almost always a bad sign.

 

The message was from Kevin, one of our staff who used to be a client, who is usually online at all hours.  “Nahla collapsed,” he said, having been contacted by her sister, who is also a client. “She says she wasn’t breathing.”  I knew this wasn’t going to turn out well, but I waited the long minutes until Kevin’s next message.  “She passed away.”  If you had asked me for a list of the ten clients most likely to be the next picture on our memorial wall, Nahla would not even come close.  She was 27, working for amazon, and had gotten her apartment. She was her cognitively impaired younger sister’s guide through the world, helping her with everything.  But she had recently been diagnosed with cardiomyopathy, an enlarged heart, and had her first cardiology appointment coming up.

 

Considering the situation, I couldn’t help but wonder if she was yet another person killed by poor quality healthcare that low income and homeless people often experience.  I wondered if someone failed to appreciate the seriousness of her condition, creating a missed opportunity to intervene.  I will probably never know, but I have had enough clients die because of incompetent, neglectful or overburdened health care that I always tell any client who is in a position to make a choice to get themselves to Manhattan.