Blue Monday

It's now nearly 3 weeks since I stopped with the sleeping tablets. I'd expected that the side effects from stopping, sleeping badly, dreaming, etc, would have receded by now but they haven't. I had a terrible night on Saturday, dreaming that we were going to bury Kay and that I could't get my jeans off so I could change into a suit. I woke up completely stressed, so much so that I simply downed one of the lighter sleeping tablets to attempt to knock myself out for the rest of the night. The result was Zombie Rob on Sunday morning.

Then on Sunday night as I was drifting, trying to get to sleep, I had a perfect audio memory of Kay crying. Crying as she did when she'd had enough, crying for Mama, crying for me. It was a heart braking memory and, like a bad song, it kept playing itself over and over in my head, through the night and into the day on Monday. Of course, I slept very badly and waking up with that audio track in my head cast the day in a bad light from the beginning.

Last night I tried knocking back some Melatonin a few hours before bed, but that didn't help either. Its not clear to me if this problem is a side effect of stopping the medication or whether the medication was damping down symptoms already present. Or whether both things are true. But what concerns me is how long I can expect this to continue. I'm really close to the maximum amount of sleep deprivation that I can take, meaning that during the day I'm increasingly unable to do very much.

It has been suggested that I'm being rather too hard on myself, c.q. that stopping the sleeping meds is unnecessary and premature. I'll have to think about that, but now that I'm this far down the road I don't really want to give up, at least if either there's some other way of managing the problem or if things could be expected to improve on the short term. I'd really like to get back on my feet which to my mind means being free of props.

The other thing that has resurfaced recently is the strong feeling of disbelief that Kay is not here. It just doesn't seem right that she's gone, the hole left behind is too big to be real. I keep expecting to hear her, see her, feel her. She is way too real, way too strong to have gone from our lives. As I get access to more memories it seems increasingly impossible that she's not there.

Her death is old news to most of the rest of the world. But for us the whole thing remains incredibly actual.