Grief Doesn't Sleep

(Content Warning: Hospice, Death, Grieving)

While browsing Facebook recently, I came across a post about the ways grief can affect sleep.

And suddenly, I found myself thinking about a chair in a hospice room eleven years ago.

In February 2015, my mom became ill and was hospitalized.

By April 1st, she had become unresponsive.

Then, on April 4th, she opened her beautiful green eyes.

I immediately began sobbing.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

I assured her I was great as I raced out of her hospital room to get the nurse.

I never heard her speak again.

In June, she entered hospice and, in a way, I entered with her.

For ten days, that hospice room became my world.

I ate whatever visitors brought me. I drank from a large thermos of water. I washed up in the bathroom sink. The normal routines of life stopped mattering because there was only one thing that mattered anymore:

My mom was dying, and I wanted to be there for her.

At night, I slept lightly in a chair beside her bed with her hand in mine.

I was terrified that if I fell too deeply asleep, she might need me and I wouldn't know.

Sometimes, when visitors came, I'd slip into the separate hospice living room and try to sneak in a short nap. But even then, I never really slept.

I didn't mind.

She was my mom.

I'd have done anything to be there for her in her final moments.

And on July 1st, 2015, at approximately one o'clock in the afternoon, I was.

For a long time, I thought of those ten days simply as something I had survived. Something my body endured because it had to.

I didn't think much about what might have come home with me.

It's been eleven years since I slept in that chair.

And my sleep has never recovered.

I still sleep in one- or two-hour intervals. I wake throughout the night. Even when I'm exhausted, some part of me seems reluctant to surrender completely to sleep.

Always tired.

Always worried.

Always vigilant.

For years, I thought of it simply as the way I sleep.

Then I saw that Facebook post.

And I wondered if maybe some part of me is still sitting in that chair.

Still holding her hand.

Still listening for a change in her breathing.

Still afraid that if I sleep too deeply, something will happen while I'm not watching.

I don't know whether those ten days are the reason I sleep the way I do now. Human bodies are complicated, and eleven years is a long time.

But the post made me think about all the ways grief changes us that don't necessarily look like grief.

We recognize the obvious ones.

The empty chair at holidays.

The birthday that suddenly hurts.

The song you can't listen to anymore.

The phone number you can't bring yourself to delete.

But maybe grief lives in quieter places, too.

In habits.

In routines.

In the things that make us anxious without knowing why.

In the way we react to hospitals.

In the way we care for other people.

In the things our bodies learned during the worst days of our lives and never quite learned to forget.

Maybe even in the way we sleep.

There are things about losing my mother that changed dramatically with time. The grief that once felt impossible to carry eventually became something I learned how to live alongside.

But every once in a while, I'll discover another little piece of it tucked somewhere I never thought to look.

And I'll realize:

Oh. You're still here, too.

Grief changes you.

Sometimes in big ways everyone can see.

Sometimes in small ways only you know about.

And sometimes, apparently, even in the way you sleep.

Or don't.