Good Grief Episode One: Insomnia

Blake Kasemeier
Sep 2, 2018 · 5 min read

At the beginning of 2018 I lost my mom to a very brief but brutal fight with lung cancer, she was 57, and no one (no one) saw it coming.

I began journaling my personal experience with grief, and eventually turned those journals into a podcast. The following is a transcript of my first episode. I hope this is helpful to you, because it truly has been for me.

From what I’ve learned, this process can be excruciatingly painful alone, but I think if we take the time to share our stories and lend our ears we can walk away with some Good Grief.

This week’s theme? Insomnia.

Insomnia, is one of those rare conditions that is both a symptom and a disease. It is, as defined by the National Sleep Association, “difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep, even when a person has the chance to do so.” Which sounds innocent enough, but for anyone who has ever suffered from it, we know it’s an incredibly frustrating condition.

Insomnia is the absolute failure to zen.

It is searching for shadows with flashlights.

It appears, at a distance, to be an affliction of privilege; “can you imagine those who live lives with such excesses of time and energy that have trouble with something as luxurious as sleep?” Alas, insomnia has no discretion, and it visits the poor just the same as it visits the affluent. In fact, at least 1 in 3 people suffer from it in America — that’s over 100 million people.

Insomnia, like migraines, like uncomfortable earnestness, and a love for 70’s era Springsteen, is something that I shared with my mom. She would wake up between 3 and 4 am, stirred by a bill that might be overdue, or an awkward turn of phrase from a dinner party 20 years ago, or, a potential miscalculation on a job bid that would leave her short a few hundred dollars, money she had already created a future for.

But most often, it was me. If it wasn’t me, it would eventually become about me. Worries about negotiating hairpin turns on my road bike at 45 MPH, worries that I was lonely, worries that I would forever be future focussed, drifting through the present, missing the chance to laugh and love and enjoy a slice of pizza after a drunken night out with my girlfriend. She worried that I worried too much, that she loved too intensely, that we didn’t have enough, that I was too estranged from my dad, that maybe she was to blame.

Of course it’s not all worrying, per se. It’s often just thinking, just sad thoughts that overcome you.

Leonard Cohen once said “The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.” And admittedly, as a younger man, I romanticized the shit out of my occasional sleeplessness, dropping it in casual conversation with a cute barista as I order 4 shots of espresso, she’d look at me a little suspicious, and I’d explain that “I was an artist and couldn’t control the hours my inspiration kept.” — It is a wonder I ever got laid.

Insomnia has a certain kind of momentum, snowballing is decent metaphor, but a dam bursting is a better one, wildfire is probably the best.

Time is insomnia’s dry brush tinder, it is what accelerates it from an innocent thought to an overwhelming problem. You know the saying that any dream can be turned into a goal if you simply add a deadline? The same is true about turning a worry into a crisis and of course the ultimate deadline, the most permanent and least predictable one, the only real and objective deadline, is death.

The last time I saw my mom outside of the hospital was Christmas day. She insisted on riding along while my step dad took my fiance and I to the airport.

I was flying back to Oakland, and she didn’t make it home without getting so sick that they had to stop at the pharmacy to check her temperature.

Within a day she was spending her nights in the ER, and she never really left.

This was the beginning of my most recent bout of insomnia. I would wake up in a sweat, heart racing, and just sit up at the edge of the bed for a while. Usually just an hour or two, my mind mostly blank but there was a sort buzzing in me that simply would not yield to comforts of sleep. It was familiar, nostalgic almost. The first night, you fight it, the second night you resent it, the third night you accept it.

I wish I could tell you it was my mom’s health that kept me awake, that I was up worrying about her cancer diagnosis or the cough that she’d been struggling to breathe over for the past four months — that I was worried about her survival — and while that came later (admittedly, none of us knew how serious any of it was until it was over).

I was just awake with the ambiguous sort of worry that follows you from room to room when you feel like you’re forgetting something before you leave for the airport, the feeling you have when your partner’s ex comments on an instagram post of the two of you from two years ago, it’s impossibly petty, but it haunts you, and you hate yourself for it, and you can’t tell if it’s your self loathing or your suspicions that are raging inside of you — and you don’t know which is worse.

Those nights I was up thinking about what she was thinking about; struggling to sleep over the unfamiliar humm of her oxygen mask and the occasional beeping alarm that signified one of her IV bags was nearly empty.

I sent this video to my mom while she was in the ER. She loved LJG and this cover was produced for the podcast “I only listen to the Mountain Goats” — which I also sent to her.

I’d send her emails full of podcasts, Laura Jane Grace songs, lyrics that I thought she’d like- all intended to help her escape, to pass the time faster while she waited to be cleared to return home. I’d impress the shit out of myself with how clever my emails were. I’d imagine her opening them as soon as they hit her inbox, bored as hell with binge watching shows about vikings on Netflix at 4 in the morning, so eager to have something fresh from me.

But, after I’d hit send, days would pass, we’d text and call, and more time would pass. Eventually I’d ask her about it, “What did you think of that Mountain Goats song?” and she’d tell me she was too tired to listen, that most nights she just tried to rest, and that was when I knew that I had dramatically miscalculated the severity of her condition and the limits of my charm.

No matter how hard I tried, my jokes would not beat cancer.

Until next time take care of yourself. I’ll leave you with this line from the hip hop group The Metermaids: “Tell the people that you love that you love them, make music like nobody will hear it, and if your ever at a wedding and the dance floor is empty, dance hard motherfucker, be fearless.


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