Groundhog Day

When you experience a significant loss or something traumatic, the only time you truly get away from it is when you are sleeping.  Getting to sleep each night was difficult for me.  Just getting into my PJs and under my covers was difficult.  I did not want to go to bed without my husband.  I did not want to lay there in the dark next to nothing.  I had slept next to Gordie for 16 years.  I would sometimes close my eyes and try to trick myself that he was next to me but it rarely worked. 

By the second week following Gordie's death, I was taking a mild anti-anxiety pill, which relaxed me at night, turned my brain off, and let me go to sleep.  After several sleepless nights following Gordie’s death my Mother, who is an RN, took matters into her own hands and called my doctor.

“She’s not sleeping…at all.  She can’t keep doing this.  She has two little boys.  She needs something and she said she does not want sleeping pills”, my Mom told my doctor.

The pills my Dr prescribed did just the trick.  I was still staying up into the wee hours of the morning either working on closing out Gordie’s life or doing my weird Internet searches looking for proof that Heaven existed.  But I would eventually take my pill and drift off to sleep.

The problem with sleeping is that you wake up.  And when you wake up each morning you have this blissful, sleepy, not yet awake, 10-second period where you think you are living your old life.  You forget the bad thing that happened, you forget that your life was completely hijacked, you forget that you are living a nightmare.  It was the best 10 seconds of my day for years.  But then, the sleepiness goes away, you fully wake up and the reality of recent events and the life you are now living comes crashing down like a rock slide.  And it happens every…fucking…day.  Ten seconds of bliss followed by the crashing reality.  Ten seconds of bliss followed by crashing reality.  Over and over and over.  Day after day after day.  It’s like that movie Groundhog Day.  It just keeps happening...morning after morning. 

Most mornings I would bury my face in my pillow and try to go back to sleep so that I could wake up again to that 10 seconds of blissful forgetfulness.  But I was rarely successful.  Instead the tears would roll out of my eyes and into my pillow, as I thought about getting up and living yet another day in the hell that was now my life. 

So, for the rest of March, April and May, I became a morning runner.  I would drag myself out of bed tired since I was still probably only sleeping five hours a night, even with the help of my precious pill.  I would put my running clothes and shoes on, grab my iPod, and silently slip out my parents’ door.  The running was the only thing that helped mitigate the crashing reality that hit me like a ton of bricks every time I woke up.