Thirteen Hours

On the drive into the city, out on the motorway, an overwhelming tiredness swept over me. I fall asleep in cars all the time, and this was nothing like that. I was trying to follow what Stu, Dan’s dad, was saying and the words stopped reaching me, and my eyes got so heavy that I was gone before I knew I was going. I woke on the far side of the city, not sure for a moment where I was or which way we were going. Heavy and buzzing at the same time, needing to move and too heavy to move. Both at once.

I have not slept more than six hours in years. Most nights it is four to six. I wake at three and do not get back down. For a long time I thought that was just the body I had now.

The truth goes back further than the grief. Before I got sober, alcohol was how I slept. I drank enough to go under, most nights, for years before Dan ever died. The deep sleep these last two months is sleep I have not had since I was nineteen.

So a tiredness that drops me mid-sentence on a motorway means something. For years the drink put my body under. Then, sober, it kept watch instead, half awake, listening for the next thing.

That night, back at the hotel, I called my mom. I had thought we would talk for a while. As soon as I got into the bed and she answered, what came out of me was, ‘Sorry, I thought I could talk longer, but I actually just need to crash out.’ I fell asleep at nine thirty. I did not wake until ten forty-five the next morning. Just over thirteen hours.

It was the night before the anniversary of the memorial. The hardest week of the year, in the city where all of it happened. And my body, which had not let me sleep a full night in three years, chose that night to put itself all the way down.

Why grief takes your sleep first

Grief comes for your sleep first, and it is one of the last things it gives back. A body in fresh grief is a body braced, and a braced body does not drop into the deep, undefended places where real sleep lives. Add years of going under instead of resting, and the body forgets the way down.

I have spent the last six months working on it. Not with willpower, with the slow, unglamorous stuff. The same wind-down most nights. Light in the morning, less of it at night. Movement that tires the body in a good way. The kinds of things that tell a nervous system, by repetition, that it is allowed to stop guarding. It has been working. Eight hours some nights now, where there used to be four.

What finally let my body stand down

So when thirteen hours arrived, in the worst week and the worst place, what it felt like was relief. Sober, and surrounded by people who were not going anywhere, some part of me finally believed it was safe to let go. The body that had held the door shut for three years let it swing open.

The body did not break that night. It stood down.

You were never meant to grieve alone. Some of what grief takes, it gives back only when the body is finally sure someone else has the watch.

If your nights look like mine did, I write five short letters for the griever you are right now, one a day, free. The second one is about what the body is doing. Get the letters.