In the past 90 days or so I have had difficulties getting a good night’s sleep. For me that means at least about 5 to 6 hours uninterrupted by bathroom visits. As time went on the amount of sleep was gradually reduced to about one or two hours and then 45 minutes of restlessness — watching TV, reading, feeling anxious and unsettled emotionally. Eventually I was feeling sleep deprived during the day. I greeted too many dawns fully awake.
One particular night was an insomniac’s fare — sleeplessness only moderated by tossing and turning, walking about the house, worrying about what this experience was and what it meant. I tried to survey what had happened or what was happening to me and these factors loomed large. Of course, I am the last to know.
I had been sitting in on a course on grief which I felt was creeping into my mind in a way that, apparently, was not healthy for me. I was struggling with a second reading of Becker’s The Denial of Death whose implications were unnerving intellectually and psychologically. I don’t deny death, that each day is adieu to who I am, and more so that at 73 I am nearing my end.
I had recently returned to psychotherapy after four decades with the express self-purpose of attaining support for all kinds of issues, one of which was to find solace or comfort as I stumbled into oblivion. Apparently I was obsessing over the years left to me and how was I to use them without resorting to a panicked filled bucket list, Americana at its most strident. In this nation we don’t relate to one another. What we do is sell a part of ourselves like so much dry goods to one another, each moment of the day. I was living with fear, drenched in it.
All of these concerns combined, I believe, served to keep me up through the night. One day I expressed all this to my wife, Jane, and I felt some relief later that day as if something had lifted or eased, but not too much so. Nevertheless, after checking with a pharmacist I settled upon an over the counter supplement, Melatonin, as something that might ease my nightly sleeplessness. It didn’t work. Thinking about all this, I called my physician’s assistant and made clear to her that my sleeplessness had an undercurrent to it of anxiety and could she ask the doctor for a non habit-forming and non-addictive medication. I am glad I fully expressed the anxiety part of it and did not hold back.
He prescribed Trazodone, “an antidepressant used to treat depression. It may also be used for relief of an anxiety disorder (e.g. sleeplessness, tension), chronic pain or to treat other conditions….” (It is the first time in my life I have ever had to take such a drug for such a condition.) So the medication seemed on target. I’ve been on it for fewer than three days and some relief has been given but not a full night’s sleep. The prescription information says: “It may take 1 to 4 weeks to work.” Well, it hasn’t kicked in as yet, but I hope it does. I must wait.
As I think over and reconsider the cumulative weight of worry all these past weeks wreaked upon me by myself, I observe how fog creeping into me like Sandburg’s cat paws gnawed at my inner self, shrouding me, making me unclear to my own self. I was self-depressing myself. I was making myself anxious. Somewhere, most unconsciously, I chose to somatize these mental tensions through sleeplessness. As if the latent stresses were telling my unknowledgeable self that I was not awake, not aware of what was occurring in me. So sleeplessness was a telegram to myself — it is a symptom. What is keeping me awake? If you stay awake, you might defer and delay dying, at least for this one night, so morbidly amusing. Perhaps.
About a year ago in a different medical situation, a nurse practitioner asked me if I was generally an anxious person. I quickly said no defensively, as if it implied an imperfection in my self. I lied to her. I am an anxious person, and a worrier. The fear is that the personal idiosyncracies of my very own special death and dying will not be controlled in any way — that high anxiety will win out and flood me, as I lay dying, serving doubly to compound the process itself.
To die is the final loss of control, as if we have ever controlled anything in life. I imagine my fear is that I will be blown apart, disparate selves, unglued and unhinged when I “allow” death to have its way with me. That is the great fear in me, the loss of control. And that, I think, creates a large measure of anxiety in me. I don’t want to lost my grip on things, I have been that way all my life.
For me it is a great fear to die explosively, to burst asunder and to be no more. I suffer from dread.
I cannot say more. I am stuck with this last thought. I don’t want to hear an observation, asked a question, given an answer or proffered a therapeutically astute interpretation. Primally, I want to be held by my mother, in her arms, like a young child, as I pass through. This might ease my cowardice. There, there, child, just hold me.
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