Wednesday's Woe/Thursday's Therapy - Will I Ever Get 8 Hours of Sleep Again in This Lifetime?

Our grandbaby girl as a newborn...sleeping "like a baby"...

Wednesday's Woe/Thursday's Therapy

Will I Ever Get 8 Hours of Sleep Again in This Lifetime?

Why is it that insomnia comes with Child-Loss Grief? Our bodies are exhausted. Our minds are exhausted. Our souls are spent with the daily struggle. So why is it that we cannot seem to get a good night's sleep? We know the healthy habits to do. We practice those things. But Child-Loss is bigger than we are.

Losing a child changes you in ways most people can never understand. It scars your psyche with an ineffaceable wreckage. It strains your soul with abominable confusion, leaving you questioning the very faith that once provided stabilization to your being. It shadows your heart with a disconsolate burden that never leaves; it may be temporarily distracted or even momentarily forgotten but the deep sadness always hovers just under the surface, waiting to resurrect when you least expect it. It impacts every facet of your life with a shroud of grief that forever darkens the atmosphere of your world. Like Chinese handcuffs, it grabs you and will not let you go, until you submit to its forces and let go your resistance; then you will be released, if only for a few moments...

As one of our child-loss cohorts stated when trying to clarify to a friend who is a civilian to our Child-Loss Grief War after he overheard that the friend had chastised Tommy as to why Tommy and I weren't "getting over" our loss: 

"Sometimes your mouth overrides your brain (leaving out the expletives he included)! You don't understand child-loss, and you never will. I lost my child. You need to understand that although I am not hurting as much as I once did, still, I am always hurting, and I always will." 

So how does this constant trauma affect our sleep? As one Child-Loss mother says,

When Tommy's blood-pressure shot up high recently, his doctor surprisingly said to him, "Oh, your shoulder is hurt! When the body is compromised in some way, the blood pressure will shoot up." I guess a similar principle is at work in our poor grief-stricken bodies.

Our hearts are broken, so at some level, our body must know there's a crisis it needs to be attending. There's not enough peace inside for our bodies to allow us the calm for a good night's sleep.

Pictures: Our grandbaby, mine; Sleep graphic, thanks to "Help Stop Abuse on Women"