awake





It's 3:30 am. I am awake. Bay Girl went to bed at 10pm, I was so tired then I probably could have fallen asleep on the hardwood floor. I stumbled into bed and immediately went to sleep. Now it's 3:30am and I've been awake for an hour trying to will myself back to sleep. I guess this is anxiety. I guess this is grief. still.

I will admit I occasionally did this sort of thing before. It was ocasional, now it's regular. In the before it was usually because there was some big event the next day. A wedding or a party, I was thinking about, trying to order all the things I had to do to get ready. It was usually closer to midnight and I hadn't gone to sleep yet at all.

"Dan, Dan, I can't sleep Dan, talk to me" snore snore snore is what came from Dan.  Not deterred I would give him a little nudge "Dan, Dan, what are you doing I can't sleep, Dan"  mumble mumble mumble "go to sleep Jennifer, worry about it in the morning" mumble mumble mumble. Then I would give him a bigger nudge. "Dan tell me a story" This whole conversation was done while I would turn an fidget and otherwise express my uncomfortableness and how I could not possibly fall asleep.

When Dan had had enough of my shenanigans he would sit up on his side and let out a big huff. throwing his arm around my waist and grabbing my hip. He always told me God made his hand and my hip to fit perfectly together, one of the 1,000 some ways he knew we were meant to be together. Then he would pull me close next to him so I couldn't toss and turn anymore. Then I could hear his voice in my ear, slow, calm, quiet, peaceful. Dan's voice. It had this magic calming rhythm? tone? I'm not sure how to describe it. Always subtle, always calming. One of the 1,000 reasons he was so good at his counseling job, he was known for "talking people down" when they were panicked or agitated. He even did it way back in high school, he could always calm people down.  He would tell me stories mostly, stories about a magical land he made up, stories he wanted to turn into a series of children's chapter books, he would test them out on me. I would fall asleep listening to his voice.  He never finished his stories (ok it's possible I fell asleep first) He never got his books written, he died instead.

Sometimes I wonder how in the world I ever fall asleep at all without being able to hear his voice talking to me. I wonder when this grief thing will finally let me sleep normally again. Everything normal is gone, including sleep.

I wrote a book about my grief, you can read it here: Carry on Castle

Comments

  1. UnknownJune 15, 2017 at 7:15 AM

    Jenny, your writing really pulls me in. I love the way you describe each interaction and thought. I think you could write a book.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Milestones in grief

Image
                                                                Dan and I around 2011 I wrote this for a writing contest about milestones. Writing about every grief milestone would take a book and I had a word limit so I couldn't do that. I tried to do the really big ones. I have not had a particularly eventful life. When I was eight, my parents moved, but they took me with them. At ten, I had a pretty bad accident, but I came out of it fine. My husband and I met at sixteen, and at nineteen, we went against all good advice and got married. I gave birth to our daughter when I was 27.   I loved our boring, normal life. We were living our happily ever after. I was a stay at home mom, Dan was finishing up grad school. Everyone says this kind of thing at funerals, but Dan really was the most amazing person I’ve ever met in my...
Read more

PTSD is not for sissys

Image
Do you know what PTSD is? Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I bet you think you do.  You might say something like "ya its what people that go off to war have" true. You might say "It's when people see really terrible things" true. A few really smart people might say "ya my friend watched her beloved husband die and now she has it" very true. If you are a mental health professional you might say "ya a child who all of a sudden has a dad who dies will have it" also true.  I was telling a friend once about how life is now without Dan and she said "wow it's almost like you have PTSD or something." No not almost, we do. But what exactly is it? Well it's complicated. I can't describe it for baby girl because I am not in her mind (unfortunately) but I can try and describe it for me. I am hesitant to do so; it's not an easy thing to talk about, But if we are going on a the point of this blog is to be therapeutic for me and h...
Read more

My therapist told me to start a blog

Image
My therapist told me to start a blog. She thinks I have something worth while to say. Something? Yes. Worth while? I guess we will find out. I mean, everyone and their dog has a blog, right? What makes me so special? At the very least, I hope it will be cathartic. Here is the short story, which I will elaborate on in future blogs. Eighteen months ago, I was 34. I had a 7 1/2 year old daughter. I was married to my high school sweetheart, and we were still madly in love with each other. It was like a fairy tale; we liked to compare ourselves to Wesley and Buttercup from The Princess Bride. We were in the process of adopting a baby. And then we weren't. And then it was gone. In a second, literally one second, he was gone. My husband Dan died, extremely suddenly and unexpectedly. All day long he was fine. We went downtown to our favorite bookstore, we ate lunch, we had dinner, we went to bed at 11. At 11:15 I called 911. At 12:01 am on January 12, 2015, Dan was pronounced dead on...
Read more