Sleep - Please Be My Friend Again

Originally posted as a facebook note on 10/12/10 - I think of all the things I used to take for granted before Max died.  One of them was the ability to lay my head down at night and go to sleep.  No matter what cares or anxieties I had before August 6, they pale in comparison.  Sleep used to be my friend, a way to not only escape the craziness of the day but to find rest for my body and spirit.  That is no more.

The nightmares have stopped being a nightly happening, which is a blessing.  I still have them every once and awhile, I wake up drenched in sweat, and remember nothing except terror and running for my life.

Now I lay my head on the pillow, and my mind won't shut off.  I get flashes of the crash.  Max flying forward into the steering wheel.  Max laying in the grass on the side of the highway.  Max laying on a silver steel table in the morgue, going through the organ transplantation process.  These things are what my mind imagines, because I never actually saw them, I just heard about them.  Then there are the awful things I did see.  Max laying in a casket.  The wounds on his body that the funeral home makeup could not hide.  His body breaking down each time we saw him until we said goodbye the day of his funeral.  Then back to the imagination with cremation.   I do not dwell on any of these things, and I certainly don't go there on purpose, but as I try to go to sleep, these things haunt me.

And then to the cemetery, which will be where his ashes stay from now until the earth passes away.  I try to re-focus my thoughts, pray, talk to God.  All of this is quite distracting when all I am trying to do is go to sleep!!!!

Exhaustion does take over every other night or so and I do sleep.  I feel like a zombie.  I cannot remember whether a conversation actually happened or whether I dreamed it.  My therapist expressed concern that I was still taking sleeping pills after 9 1/2 weeks.  She said I am 'still within the range of normal', but hoped that by 6 months I would be off the sleeping pills.  That is truly hard to imagine at this point.   I cannot even remember if I took one tonight, so I am afraid to take one because I don't want to double up!  I wonder, will I ever truly rest peacefully again?